visions périphériques

The apartment hunt has commenced. Last night I went to view my first apartment, which I found on a spreadsheet prepared by an AUC student. I was attracted to the interests of my potential roommate, which included photography and filmmaking. The voice on the other end of the phone was calm and intriguing, and when I mentioned that I like photography, he said, “Oh, really, I’m actually out taking pictures on the bridge right now.” The potential roommate—“Mamo,” a.k.a. Mahmoud—was a 32 year-old married Egyptian who punctuated the ends of his sentences with British English accented words like, “mate,” and phrases like, “cool man.” I told Mamo that I was interested in living with an Egyptian so that I would have a live-in tutor to exploit. “Cool man.” I hopped in a taxi feeling pretty optimistic that I’d found the rare, eccentric roommate I’d hoped for without much of a search at all.

It’s not that Mamo and I couldn’t have lived together in some weird form of harmony—pairing a slightly neurotic, exercise loving, close-cropped ex-military Westerner with an “artistic,” heavily dread-locked, hash-smoking slacker Egyptian must have worked once or twice in the past—it’s just that I’ve never been much of a gambler, and I’m more risk averse in my old age. It was, however, great to get out of the house, and I very much enjoyed spending the evening chatting with Mamo, who reminded me of a far cooler and more authentic version of the person I once aspired to be. Mamo has all of the charm of Jack Kerouac—who I never met, obviously, but feel as if I know—without the paralyzing despondency that led Kerouac to the doldrums, the bottle, and eventually his grave. Mamo claims to be a Sufi, a self-chosen member of the ancient mystical sect of Islam that originated in the high mountains of places like Turkey and Iran. Along with “cool man” and “mate,” his sentences are riddled with “inshallah” (as/if God wills it) and “alhamdulillah” (thanks/praise be to God), two phrases that are increasingly common among more secular Arab hipsters as well as the dutifully God-fearing. Mamo doesn’t respond to the five daily calls to prayer, and he’s not planning on participating in Ramadan, the month long dawn-to-dusk fasting marathon that begins tomorrow; he does, however, make frequent reference to God, and even more frequent reference to hash, which seems to be his chosen superhighway, his own personal “night ride,” if you will, to Allah’s presence.

I did not know this, but apparently Anwar Sadat smoked hash like a chimney, and that’s how he chilled out enough to broker the Arab-Israeli peace process, a deal that got him killed by early members of Sa’id Qtab’s Muslim Brotherhood. I can easily picture Sadat and Jimmy Carter blazing a huge splif, gazing out at the pyramids from a Cairo rooftop, pumping Oum Khalsoum and smiling at one another through glazed eyes. “Whoa,” Carter would have said, “trippy.” “Aiwa,” Sadat would’ve replied, “and I get to do this every day.” It’s more difficult to imagine the chief Brother himself, Sa’id Qtab, doing the same thing from his prison cell in Cairo’s impoverished hinterlands—though I have heard that Qtab was a huge Bob Marley fan. “Every country has its drug,” Mamo told me, “in America it’s coke, in China it was opium, in Egypt it’s hash.” What he was trying to explain to me, as far as I could tell, was something of a conspiracy theory in which the Egyptian government—once known as “Pharaoh,” perhaps the earliest incarnation of “The Man,” and now known as “Mubarek,” who was born in the time of Pharaohs—turns a blind eye toward the majority of hash trafficking in order to keep workaday Egyptians subdued, ambivalent, and broke, and therefore politically impotent. “That’s an interesting theory Mamo,” I said, and his smile turned serious.

Mamo leaned in conspiratorially, leering over the top of his glasses. “It’s not a theory, man.”

Mamo told me a great joke about Hosni Mubarek, Egypt’s octogenarian President, one of the few elder statesmen who came into this Earth before John McCain. It goes like this: A friend of Mubarek’s buys a pet turtle for his son. Mubarek says, “Why a turtle? Why not a dog, or a cat?” The man replies, “A turtle will last throughout the generations. My son will pass it on to his son, and so on, for a very long time.” Mubarek, intrigued, asks, “How long do turtles live?” “Oh, maybe three- or four-hundred years!” the man replies. “We shall see,” says Mubarek, grinning, “we shall see.”

The apartment itself was magnificent, though it could’ve used a good scrubbing and a visit from Molly Maid, or me. It was on the third floor of an old French building with high ceilings and tall windows, the double-eave kind that lock together with a knob in the center. The windows looked out on Tahrir Square, the thrumming plaza and sometimes market in the center of Cairo’s downtown, in between the Ministry of the Interior and the Egyptian Museum. The noise from outside—shouting humans, diesel engines, taxi horns—man was it loud. “But look at this,” said Mamo, locking the windows, “silence.” And it was true; somehow the old, thick glass blocked almost all of the noise from the street. Unfortunately, Mamo’s apartment doesn’t have air-conditioning, so I had a good sweat going by the time we got to talking of conspiracy theories. The entire time, his French “wife,” Marie, sat at the kitchen table, dutifully practicing her Arabic script. I didn’t see any rings, but I did see the slight protrusion of her belly. They’re expecting a child in January and hoping to move to France to live with her family for several months this winter, a move that would secure French citizenship for the child and great healthcare for Marie and her baby. Will Mamo have to submit to les testes ADN, the highly controversial paternity test mandatory for fathers hoping to join their émigré wives and children in France? I didn’t ask, though I was curious, of course. Maybe that’s only for Maghrebins. Doing the math of their relationship, I realized that she got pregnant as soon as they met, and I wondered—at least I tried to wonder, in the sense that I tried rather unsuccessfully not to jump to pessimistic conclusions—whether or not their relationship would survive.

After leaving Mamo’s, I decided to stroll around downtown. The city was bursting with life, all of the streets were filled with people, cars, cats, even horses. I wandered through the streets, dark ones as well as bright, getting lost in the fray, taking turns down every street that looked as if it might hold a secret. I walked through a narrow, grungy alleyway that turned out to be a meat market, with lambs and poultry strung up from ropes and chains at various stages of manual processing. I saw a boy chopping up a whole chicken with dozens of live chickens and turkeys at his feet, pecking at grain strewn on the blood-soaked floor. On another street, chrome fenders and grills hung alongside and above garage doors for a hundred yards. Cairo’s SUV-driving elite, of whom there must be a few, though I have not seen them, come to that street to buy armor.

The most fascinating thing of all was happening on the corner of Nubar and Sherif Streets, in the middle of a major thoroughfare. Throngs of Egyptian men and women were haggling over the prices of dates, ground wheat, rice, and other things I could only describe, like concoctions involving bottled snakes. The shopping crowds were so thick, so chaotic that I had to stop for a while merely to gawk. Imagine the New York Stock Exchange on a bad day in 1929, widen the age range of the average trader by forty years on either side, add every color in the rainbow, and throw in a steady stream of taxis jockeying for position right there on the floor, lights and horns blaring from every angle. Not to mention the smells, from the most putrid to the sweet scents of ripe guava and mango floating out from juice stalls, smells of sweating humans mixed with the nutmeg, cardamom, and paprika bulging from burlap sacks. Further on, there was the smell of shisha and the sounds of gurgling hookahs, the slaps of decks of cards, dominoes, and backgammon pieces, the cackling of old men out on the town, or perhaps just in front of the crumbling buildings they’ve lived in since birth.

If you think New York deserves to be called “The City that Never Sleeps,” then you should see Cairo—Tahrir makes Times Square look like Brugges, and Tahrir is just one neighborhood in a city of nearly thirty million people. Just a few nights ago in Zamalek, one of the quieter, more residential neighborhoods (sometimes even called a suburb, which is weird because it’s smack-dab in the middle of Cairo), Theo managed to get his clothes dry-cleaned, his hair cut, and his hunger satiated, all after midnight. So much of the city’s commerce takes place in the open air that nothing begins until early afternoon, because the mornings are too hot and muggy and it only begins to feel tolerable around sunset.

Speaking of things that never sleep—I’m becoming one. It’s quarter to six and I’ve been awake since four, writing and nursing a mild case of indigestion. Last night I ate a dish called koushri, which contains every possible form of starch you could imagine: lentils, fava beans, vermicelli, macaroni, and spaghetti. It was good, very good. I just wish I couldn’t still taste it. Truth be told, I’m up for a second reason: today is the start of Ramadan, a test of willpower that I have decided to undertake. It’ll be fun, I keep telling myself, and it’ll help me understand why all of the Egyptians around me are so cranky. Fasting means no food, no coffee, no water, no nothing, from sunrise to sunset. So this morning, when I got up, I drank a liter and a half of water. Unlike the families whose windows were lit, like mine, at four o’clock this morning, I don’t have the benefit of a wizened old grandma to cook my pre-sunrise feast. I should, however, be able to wangle a good iftar after sunset, the meal that is every good Muslim’s Ramadan “breakfast,” celebrated daily in every home, but also publicly. Starting tonight, tables will line the streets in every neighborhood in Cairo, laden with meat, breads, and fruits, offerings designed to quell the day’s crankiness and bring the madding crowds together once again.