The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (25 page)

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!”