Into Thick Air (11 page)

While Dad thanked all three hundred guests by name, a few English speakers in the audience were drawn to the American. A man asked for my address. I gave it to him. “Is Egyptian dream to go to America. But visa not easy. And airplane costs . . . how much?”

Somebody else answered obliquely, “You must have money to make money in America. I know because I stay two months in New Jersey.”

Another young man wanted to know, “Are you a Muslim?”

No, I said. I have no religion.

“No religion? But why not Muslim?”

I am a scientist. God is nature—the sun, the earth, the Nile.

Amazed looks from all, yet they pardoned me and offered another cigarette. Profession of no faith was apparently better than a competing theology.

They excused themselves: the feast had begun. It was 12:30 AM. I cut out for the hotel, leaving Mohammed with a postcard of a giant saguaro cactus. I believed I was heading in the right direction when I stopped for a shave at a dinky barbershop, a meticulous shave with a straight razor under framed pictures of Presidents Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak—a double-shave, in fact, finished off by the barber combing my unruly eyebrows and clipping my nose hairs. But upon leaving I forgot which way was north. The shops were shuttered. I stepped lightly over puddles of donkey piss, scared a cat and myself, until I was stopped by a pile of rubble in a dead-end alley. I looked up for the moon and found nothing but the feeling that I was truly lost.

I wouldn't have tried my luck if I didn't suspect that the alleys of Old Cairo are something extraordinary among huge cities. The people do not
kill you for your wallet. They don't even take it. As in
Midaq Alley
, which “overflowed with sharp tongues and roving eyes,” bad people face social castigation in Old Cairo, a punishment worse than jail. What happened to me was this: A man walked up and led me out of the maze.

The next morning I described my wedding adventure to a woman at the Press Center. “And where was this wedding?” she asked.

I told her, Butneya, at Bab Zuwayla.

“Butneya! This is not such a good place. It is where drugs are sold. Hashish. It could be dangerous.”

It had the look of a drug wedding, very ostentatious. But not dangerous.

“These people have money and like to show it. Nice houses, but they are dirty. The women have expensive dresses but bad makeup.”

In the United States, I said, such a thing is sometimes called “new money.”

“It is the same in Egypt, except here we call it, ‘Recently Having Good.' ”

 

I WAS RECENTLY HAVING GOOD. Summoned to the telephone building to pay for a phone license, I cheerfully trotted out into traffic, positioning myself behind the fattest woman pedestrian, figuring she'd take the blow. At the telephone building I flashed my authentic Egyptian press pass to enter, found the correct office in a mere fifteen minutes, and presented myself to Mr. Ali Samir.

A gentleman in a gray suit and baby-blue vest, Ali reviewed my papers and said, “Good. Now go the fifth floor, room 30.”

At room 30 they shook their heads at my form. “No, sixth floor, room 32.”

Room 32 sent me back to Ali, who was genuinely sorry and equipped me with a helper. We marched off down the hall to an office with a calendar picturing two happy Egyptians yakking on cell phones. My form was scrutinized. We were sent to the cashier. The cashier was out to lunch. My helper picked up a helper, and the three of us walked to the annex. They rapped on a door, which opened to reveal women counting immense wads of cash. They took my money and asked me to wait outside. Security, please!

With two tissue-paper receipts in hand, decorated with multicolored arabesques, I returned to Ali. He nodded sagely. “I think we can get your permit in one or two days.” Thank God, I said in Arabic. The office personnel cracked up. Perhaps I should have said “God willing,” so I threw that in for good measure.

I returned to the alleys, where every random venture led to a comfortable seat, a cup of tea, and a water pipe. The smaller the alley, the better, and in the evening I was drawn to a big wooden bench next to a spice shop. I sniffed the half-barrels of saffron and hibiscus and unknown herbs while a man swept the alley. He stopped to ask,
Would you like some hibiscus tea?
After I figured out the Arabic for
hibiscus
, I accepted. Three hours later I was still sitting on the bench.

A parade of visitors: yelping infants, slick teens, ancient creepers, and a Nubian from southern Egypt—a giant even without the superstructure of his white turban. A whirling dervish of a man popped in and to my surprise was immediately tackled by the others, who pummeled him with blows. “Don't worry,” said the man next to me, Abd Al Hady, “because it is joke. The man comes always and make disturbance because there is no business at his shop. Why not make disturbance for fun?”

I agreed: Why not? Besides, Mr. Al Hady seemed a wise creature for his fifty years, and because he was a communications engineer at the airport he knew more about my satellite phone than I did. Slightly disheveled, bad teeth askew, he peered through thick, dusty lenses with magnified eyes and wished me luck in getting the phone out of customs. When the conversation veered off into religion, Mr. Al Hady clutched his prayer beads and told me of his devotion to God. “Every day I thank God for my life. Thank God for my ears, my mouth, my eyes.”

But your eyes, I pointed out, aren't so good.

“God can fix.”

Mr. Al Hady was devout in the most appealing way, head slightly cocked while he explained the amplified prayer of the muezzin I heard five times daily from the minarets above the mosques. “Allah Akbar—God is Great.” And when the crazy man appeared for another wacky beating by his buddies, Mr. Al Hady held my hand gently and said, “Do not worry.”

I told him, I like this place, this little alley I happened upon. Did it have a name?

“Yes, it has a name. Have you read books of Naguib Mahfouz?”

Only one, I said.
Midaq Alley
.

“Well, you are in Midaq Alley. Of course it is bigger in the book. But here you are, in Midaq Alley. Thank God for your good luck.”

 

THE GOOD LUCK that brought me to Midaq Alley didn't last. I had to return to Cairo Airport Customs—the basement of Dante's Inferno.

I arrived at the airport confident I had every paper in order, having secured the final permit from Mr. Ali Samir at the telephone building. A helpful man from KLM Airlines guided me to a precustoms hurdle, a window where I exchange money for paper with pretty stamps on it. Then to the customs storeroom, where my phone sat on a shelf with fax machines and other illegal entries. I showed a man my stamped form. He pointed to the phone. I picked it up, kissed it, and said “Thank God” three times. The man laughed and then directed me to Mr. X, who guided me to Ms. Y. She glanced at my form and said with the finality of a judge, “This is permit for phone, not letter for customs. You must bring us correct letter.”

This was a test, of course—of my self-control. If I grabbed the phone and made a run for it, the machine-gun soldiers would perforate me. Ms. Y gave me a look that said she was ready to pull out her devil's pitchfork and jab me in the behind if I didn't comply.

Abraham, the airport representative of the Press Office, stepped in and began a three-hour appeal to progressively higher ranks in customs, until we had the attention of a four-star customs man. Eureka: the phone was in my mitts.

Back at the hotel, I unboxed the bicycle and screwed on the racks, pedals, handlebars, and seat. Into the handlebar bag went the precious map, showing my route south along the Nile, east to Suez and the Sinai, north to the Dead Sea. I fortified myself with a meat-stuffed pizza-pastry called a
fitir
under a sign, “Egyptian pancakes at your service.” Bought two oranges and an apple, and hailed a taxi to drive me and the bike through the tussle of traffic along the Corniche, under the deep shade of riverside fig trees
and past the rowboats propelled by clumsy, hand-hewn oars, past women demurely riding sidesaddle on motorcycles, all the way to the city's edge.

Then I was off, at first a little wobbly under the load, then smoother, leaving Cairo behind for the farms of the Nile Valley.

 

SO CROWDED IS THE FARMLAND south of Cairo that it is impossible to look around and not see a woman lugging a water pail, or a man chopping a furrow with a short-handled hoe, or a kid on a donkey buried under a bundle of palm fronds. When I stop to rest in the shade of a eucalyptus, within a minute a thin man with a thin mustache rolls up on a bicycle. He cordially offers greetings, good health, and a smoke from a pack of Cleopatras. But what he really wants is to squeeze my brake levers and get a closer look at my machine.

The feeling is mutual. I ride a battleship-gray bike, with handlebar-end shifters working triple chainrings up front and seven gears behind. It rides like a dream, but it's simply a snooze compared to a one-speed, made-in-China Flying Pigeon that's been Egyptianized. The spokes are laced with bunting in colors not found in nature. Pinwheels are spring-mounted to the handlebars. Spangled with reflectors and wound with barber-pole spirals of electrical tape, his bike looks as if it were yanked off a carnival ride.

Yet it's wholesome proletarian transportation. Clamped or welded to the frame are cantilevered platforms that fulfill personal needs such as mobile chopping block or mother-in-law seat. I flip through my Arabic notes,
hoping for small talk, but it doesn't seem the right time to announce that my wife is pregnant. He wants to know how much my bike costs, then he bids me safe passage and pedals off with a heartening yet ominous “God willing.” I figure he knows the score on Egyptian roads. I'm happy to share with the buckboards and donkey carts, but fear the taxis with prayer beads swinging from their rearview mirrors.

The trucks move slower, though the drivers say hello with their terrifying musical horns. And no matter how big the truck, its load is bigger. Men in flapping robes cling to bales of cotton, in accordance with an unwritten Egyptian law: There Is Always Room for One More.

All space in the Nile Valley serves a purpose. Crops are planted between the date palms. Dates dry atop a mud home. Only the muck of the canal bank is useless. It's spiked with pincushion grasses or thick with castor bean, plants either too vicious or too toxic to serve even as donkey fodder.

After a week of puffing water pipes in the dust bowl of Cairo, I'm feeling vaguely poisoned myself. Searching for a camp at dusk, I veer west onto progressively smaller roads, then paths, until I ride out of the cultivated lands and into the Sahara.

Alone, just like that. I drop the bike behind a low dune and set out my pad and sleeping bag. I lie back, faintly wheezing, then recover in time to climb, in the final light, a bigger dune. The view across the valley is over palms and the silent Nile and a startling string of smoking industries and sodium-vapor lights.

Dinner is ramen noodles. From the nearest village the muezzin's call to prayer fades and is replaced with the bleat of irrigation-ditch frogs. The view overhead is familiar and comforting. My camp is at nearly the same latitude as my Tucson home, so the night sky is unchanged, complete with the effervescent spume of the Hale-Bopp Comet.

I wake in the dark with fever chills, and shiver to the accompaniment of barking dogs. In the morning my fever is still there, and so are three men standing atop the big dune. They're pointing and shrugging their shoulders to say: What's up? One skips down the face of the dune to greet me with God's blessings and to explain that they are pyramid guards. Would I like to have some bread and tea?

First I need a little more sleep, because (I pantomime, with hand to forehead) I'm sick. He reaches into the folds of his ankle-length shirt and pulls out some foil-wrapped pills. Apparently they are good for any malady, but I decline. He counters with an offer to let me rest at the guard station. I accept, despite needing to carry the loaded bike up the sand hill.

To both south and north are pyramids I'd missed yesterday while keeping an eye on the taxis and lusting after the bicycles. Some are proto-pyramids, proof that the Egyptians didn't build Cairo's stupendous pyramids of Giza without practice. To the north is what appears to be a six-slab wedding cake, the Step Pyramid, each layer smaller than the one below. It's a big cake, two hundred feet high.

Of course architecture critics existed well before the pyramids, probably dating back to the Early Hut Era. The Step Pyramid apparently got a mixed review:
Nice work—but let's try it again and fill in the steps this time, so it has smooth sides
.

To my south is the curious result, a 340-foot-tall pyramid unlike any other. The Bent Pyramid slopes up steeply on the bottom half, and not so steeply on the top half. It still comes to a point, but appears shorter than intended. People who study such things wonder why. Some say there weren't materials and nonunion labor enough to stick with the steeper slope that would have made the pyramid a good deal taller. Others claim that the simple fear of collapse forced the reduction in height. Finally, the most elegant theory of all: the Bent Pyramid is
supposed
to be bent.

King Sneferu saw room for improvement, and soon the utterly symmetrical and perfectly boring Red Pyramid reached for the heavens. I'm lucky to be ill within sight of this durable tomb. It's possible the guards know the basics of embalming the dead.

The three men, Mohammed, Abd, and Abdullah, prepare mint tea on a single-burner kerosene stove, then break out some pita bread and falafel wrapped in a greasy cone of newspaper. Very good, I say, and it's the truth. After Mohammed and Abdullah split for other duties, Abd unrolls a sleeping mat for me.