Into Thick Air (10 page)

The notarized forms for my gear emitted a glow of authority that impressed the customs men at the airport. The camera wasn't a problem. Nobody asked if I was going to bicycle in the nude. But the satellite telephone caused a minor sensation. It looked like an office phone in a folding box the size of a laptop computer; the lid was the antenna. The device had power enough to talk to a satellite floating 24,000 miles above the equator.
Warning stickers with lightning-bolt graphics suggested that the user shouldn't point the antenna at children or reproductive organs or anything you hoped would last a long time.

There ensued much hand-waving and pleading on my behalf by Abraham, my special “expediter” from the airport Press Office. The customs men, crowded around the telephone, paid no attention. They opened the lid and uncoiled the antenna cable. I didn't know what would happen if they hit the ON button while their faces were inches from the antenna, but I guessed singed eyebrows and the end of my assignment.

A customs man ejected the battery from the phone and gave it to Abraham. He kept the phone. We had lost. Abraham said, “I am sorry, Mr. James, but you must leave your satellite phone. You must go to the downtown Press Office tomorrow and get the papers for the phone. Then return to the airport to get the phone.” He rolled his eyes to the bank of fluorescent lights and the heavens beyond and added in Arabic, “God willing.”

God willing, I would at least reach my hotel, despite being unable to find the words to tell my taxi driver that he'd forgotten to turn on his headlights. This wouldn't have worried me as much if the taxi were not painted, like all Cairo taxis, black with white fenders, distressingly similar to the checkered pattern on crash-test dummies.

I tried some English on Mohammed: No lights?

He smiled and patted the seat of the Peugeot wagon, which looked to be upholstered in tinsel and wool. “This Egypt. No problem.” He pointed to the streetlights. “Light.”

Because Mohammed's horn was frequently in use, he reserved the headlights as a sort of second horn for running red lights. At first this was deeply alarming. But nobody in Cairo expected anybody to stop at a signal, a mutual understanding shared by the farting buses and the silent Mercedes, the blue-smoke motorbikes and the diesel tractors. Like blood cells jostling to fit into a capillary, this honking, headlight-blinking mass of steel, rubber, and flesh pushed into the clot of downtown Cairo.

 

IN THE MORNING I set off to retrieve the phone. Only a mile to the Press Office, so I walked, smiling at the teenage police toting Kalashnikovs. They
grinned back. I resisted the lure of cafés hazed with the smoke of water pipes and slipped between the cars parked on the sidewalk. It was OK to double park so long as you left your car unlocked; the driver of the blocked car simply pushed yours out of the way.

The Press Office was sharp, with TV monitors and potted plants trembling in the blast of Power USA air conditioners. The brawl of traffic on the Corniche along the Nile was reduced to a subsonic rumble tweaked with horns and an occasional motorcycle buzz. The staff was appalled at the loss of my phone. Within an hour, the Press Office whipped up some handsomely stamped letters for me to bring to the Telephone Office, maybe one mile away.

With a neat man named Masoud from the Press Office as my guide, I was led into the maw of Egyptian bureaucracy. Behind the massive Corinthian columns of the telephone building was a warren of halls, crowded with government workers and fire extinguishers, with the latter just in case the former ignite with a cigarette the towering stacks of receipts.

Masoud was good-natured as we searched for the proper office through the main building and the first annex, but his smile waned in the second annex, and vanished when we were told to return to the first annex.

“I am angry!” He was sweating in his camel-hair sport coat. “These foolish people do not know anything!”

But they knew how to cheerfully give directions that led to more directions. The Telephone Building had offices with missing windows, offices with crank telephones, offices with people scribbling in tremendous ledgers, and one office with a man asleep with his head atop his phone. We did not disturb him, and after two hours we shambled into an office with an Immarsat satellite map and a man behind an impressive four-telephone desk. I thought:
This is it
.

It was. While we waited, Masoud explained why fans were superior to air-conditioning. “I like things natural. The fan moves air, and the air is from God.”

The air in Cairo was an eye-stinging blur of God's dust and the unholy by-products of internal combustion. In search of something more divine, I asked Masoud to translate the ornate wall hanging.

“It is from the Koran. Only one God.”

But, I said, it looks like there's more written.

“Only one God,” he repeated. Before disappearing behind a glass door, he snuck in the last word. “God not pregnant, have son you call Jesus. One God.” A minute later he returned with the news. “I think maybe you do this story without your phone. They say you must pay 220 pounds ($70), then wait for permission. Could be one week, two weeks, two months. Nobody knows such things.”

I had the money but not the time. Without the satellite phone I'd have to rely on Egyptian phones, a system presumably run by the people in this building. I cruelly concluded I'd have better luck using carrier pigeons.

Back at the Press Center, I was offered coffee and consolations and promises: the phone will be released. God willing. It's my fault, I said—I should have declared on the customs form that it was a phone, not a
satellite
phone. Then they would have never known.

“Oh, give me a break,” said the big chief with the big desk, Mr. Agamy. “We're not that naïve. They would know.” He glanced up at a row of six clocks, each set to a different world time zone. “What we must try is to go quickly to the end of the process. How long will you stay in Cairo?”

As long as it takes to get the phone, I said.

Outside the Press Office I was swallowed by the stunning clamor of the city. I had a deadline for reaching the Dead Sea, but I could always hitch a ride if I fell behind. The problem was surviving Cairo. It was an easy city to hate. Bawling boulevards trimmed with trash! Fifteen million people! Lawless drivers invading the sidewalks!

I headed out into the lunge of traffic, in the general direction of my hotel and the stupendously frank sign for Flit Insect Killer. But I was soon diverted by sidewalk booksellers hawking racy Egyptian romance novels and Victoria's Secret lingerie catalogs wrapped in no-peek plastic and dog-eared English paperbacks ranging from
The Catcher in the Rye
to
Body Armor 2000.

The sound of work drew me into a dim alley. It was blacksmiths and brass-smashers and metal-cutters. The alley was too narrow to allow even the midget trucks favored in the inner city. The afternoon sun, too, was
excluded, and men pedaled cargo tricycles through shadows that still held the cool of the spring morning.

A peek into a tea shop led to a quiet seat among quiet men, a cup of tea and a water pipe of my own. Very sweet, the tea and the smoke, with honey-soaked tobacco kept burning by glowing coals atop the bowl. I was the only tourist, and I quickly exhausted my store of Arabic. When asked a question I might understand but didn't know how to answer, I reflexively spoke the only foreign language I knew. “Si.” Nobody minded.

I left the tea shop and stuck to the little streets, wandering until the day faded and the lights came on over the meat market. Spastic chickens in wooden cages awaited the whack of cleavers. Most stands were simply a table of bloody meat dripping onto the sawdust floor, but from the ceiling of the Modern Flower Butcher Shop hung crystal chandeliers and sides of beef. From some hidden place came the strings of Vivaldi's
Four Seasons.

Women with scarves hiding their hair loaded up on liver and brains, taking care not to spill blood onto their surprisingly sleek pumps and fancy black ankle stockings. Children roamed freely into the evening. They were unescorted, but not unwatched. The sidewalk chatter was completely unintelligible, but unmistakably gossip among friends and relations. I'd been reading about such a place in Naguib Mahfouz's novel,
Midaq Alley,
but it was set during World War II in a Cairo I'd assumed had vanished with television.

Midaq Alley
was at my bedside in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, a relic with fifteen-foot ceilings and gothic armoires. In the morning I woke to birdsong and the clanging of metal. I rose from a mattress that felt as if stuffed with rags, and threw open the shutters to look down four floors to an alley. From a bicycle fitted with enormous cargo racks, a man unloaded propane cylinders the size of basset hounds. Blue and green parakeets sang from a wicker cage on a balcony opposite, where a woman stuffed grape leaves. A street sweeper whished past, and in his dusty wake men and women in gowns emerged and took their places in the alley, washing tea glasses in pails and dragging out display cases of sweets.

Breakfast at the Cosmopolitan was arid toast and a very hard-boiled egg. I read my complimentary copy of
Egypt Today
magazine, perplexed
by the advertisement for the Smart Car:
When we have no one to compete with, we keep our slogan alive.

The front desk receptionist called my name. Telephone. It was Hala from the Press Center.

“Good morning, Mr. James. We are working on your problem. We need to know the frequency used by the satellite telephone.”

That anyone cared seemed like a good sign. I explained—1.5 gigahertz, transmit and receive—and my day's work was done.

But sometimes the best travel agenda is none. I returned to the alleys and shops of Old Cairo. Ball bearings in one shop, light switches in another. Men pressing pants with irons hauled from a glowing oven. Digital micrometers for machinists.

In an alley devoted to wedding dresses, I was tailed by Mohammed, an unshakable fifteen-year-old. “I take you to most famous mosques. I learn English in school.”

I don't want a guide, I said, but you're welcome to come along.

“I am your friend. Come.”

Mohammed didn't pester me for a tip because he operated on a commission: he took me to see his uncle's store, Ramses II Papyrus, Factory Price. I wasn't interested.

“Why you no want to visit papyrus store?”

“I don't like papyrus. I like that bicycle.” I had spotted another cargo carrier outfitted with special racks.

“But this bike is common. It brings the milk.”

“I've never seen a bicycle like this. Such things do not exist in America.”

In this way I became Mohammed's guide to America, expanding on what he had learned from Westerns featuring cowboys and cactus. In return he stuck by my side through the day and into the night, through the city new and old, from the spic-and-span subway run by the “National Authority for Tunnels” to the southern gate of Old Cairo, the nine-hundred-year-old Bab Zuwayla—a pair of stone towers and massive wooden doors sheeted with iron and studs.

The gates were built to repel the Christian Crusaders. They never came. Cairo grew beyond the Bab Zuwayla, and the gates were useless by the
time Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the city and the country. Bonaparte claimed that his ambition was not to control the Gulf of Suez trade route. No—he was freeing the Egyptians from their nasty leaders, the Mamluks. The earnest Bonaparte donned a turban, mounted a camel, and announced his plans for hospitals and dams and liberty.

But the baffled Egyptians preferred to suffer under the thumb of a local fink rather than listen to an infidel tell them right and wrong. Meanwhile, the ousted Mamluks reconstituted themselves as guerrillas. The British preferred that the French not hold the key to Suez, and Admiral Nelson obliterated the French fleet off the Egyptian coast. After three years, the French went looking for other nations to civilize in their image. The civil war they left behind did not end until the rise of Mohamed Ali. In 1811, he took care of the Mamluk opposition by inviting their leaders—somewhere between sixty and five hundred, depending on the account—to a plush affair at the fortress just up the hill from the Bab Zuwayla, the Citadel. After coffee, they were slaughtered. Their heads were displayed on spikes here at the lovely Bab Zuwayla.

Some said it was barbaric, and others said you had to kill the barbarians if you wanted to improve matters. It makes no difference today. Egyptians have a soft spot for deep history, and the Bab Zuwayla is the perfect place for a wedding.

Just around the corner from the gates was a tethered and illuminated hot-air balloon, the grunt of the power generators, and a band playing at jet-engine decibels. At least three hundred people were seated beneath a gallery of lights strung over the street. People urged me into the party.

The bride and groom, in yellow silk and black suit, sat atop enormous chairs—thrones, actually—before a backdrop of drawn blue velvet. The bride's father interrupted the music to ramble into the microphone. Mohammed said, “He is thanking the friends of the family.” The accordion and finger cymbals revved back up, while a twelve-year-old Lolita performed a remarkably erotic dance. Dad returned to the mike.

Mohammed said, “He is thanking the friends of the family.”

The band began thumping again, and a more matronly woman shook her booty. There was some jostling for a view of her generous figure, blocking
my vantage, leaving me to watch the event as simulcast on color video monitors. Dad returned to the mike.

“He is thanking the friends of the family.”

Again?

“Those people come and give gifts.”

The band roared back to life, the cymbals slapping while another woman, in a zebra-stripe dress, danced alongside Lolita. A smoke machine wrapped the stage in garlands of fog.