by Tony Horwitz
* * *
Soon after my visit to the Pyramids, the supervisor of the building Geraldine and I occupied wrote a brief summary of the structure’s condition. The building, one of the newest and reputedly one of the nicest apartment houses on the Nile island of Gezira, was described as follows:
The marble is falling off from pillars inside and outside the building.
The main stairs are collapsing.
The walls and ceilings are in poor condition, filled with dust and spiders.
There are constant breakdowns of the electricity, the lighting in the apartments, and the elevators.
The three water pumps do not work because maintenance was stopped a year ago. The room which contains the three pumps has no floor tiles and has become a lake full of water.
None of this was news to us, except the fact that the building had a supervisor at all. Still, that someone had bothered to catalogue the building’s woes was in itself remarkable. The response was not. Nothing happened. What was worse, I found myself not caring. The water main burst? Malesh, I’ll shower with bottled water. There are eleven tenants trapped in the elevator again? Malesh, I’ll walk the twenty floors. The mail’s being tossed in a forgotten storeroom filled with dust and spiders? Malesh, I doubt there was anything important. And I’d been in Cairo only a few months. In another year, I feared, Egyptian inertia would so overwhelm me that I’d be clambering over mummified residents as I scrambled through the unlit stairwell.
* * *
It doesn’t take long in Cairo to realize that the only way to survive is by commandeering fixers who can cut corners (read “bribe”) and keep things ticking feebly along. And it wasn’t long before I met the ablest fixer of them all, Hassan Risk, a sweaty man with a carefully clipped mustache.
Hassan held a salaried job for which he no doubt earned the same hundred pounds a month—about fifty dollars—as every other Egyptian employee. But he also appeared on the payroll of every journalist in town, earning a hundred pounds a month from each of them as well. His only apparent function was delivering the monthly phone bill.
This in itself was not unusual. Hand-delivering bills is yet another scheme for creating employment in a country with an exploding birthrate and a collapsing economy (Egypt must feed 55 million people from an arable area the size of Holland’s). It is also a way to make sure the bill doesn’t end up in a pile of dust and spiders, with the rest of the mail. On some days, the lobby of our building was crowded with able-bodied, well-educated men waving electricity bills, newspaper bills, delivery bills—often totaling no more than a few piasters, not counting baksheesh.
Hassan Risk’s bill-delivery service came with a twist: you paid him an outrageous sum to deliver the bill so that you had him on call when you really needed him. Cairenes could wait months, even years, to have a phone installed and to have it repaired when a breakdown occurred. A computer installation could take forever. Hassan could make it happen overnight—for a price.
“Mr. Tony,” he would patiently explain, holding a frayed computer line in his palm, “I must have five hundred bounds for the Telecommunications Ministry.” He would assume a serious expression and pantomime a man dealing cards around a table. It wasn’t hard to imagine a dusty office in one of the Kafkaesque government blocks downtown, filled with supernumeraries slumped on desks strewn with papers and empty cups of tea, suddenly stirring awake as Hassan arrived with the cash. It was, of course, understood that Hassan would be dealt in as well.
It was also understood that if you didn’t deal Hassan in each month, choosing to pick up your phone bill instead, things might happen. Phone calls fading out in midsentence. Service mysteriously cut. No one available to fix the phone for weeks or months. Journalists often bitched about Hassan Risk and his monthly handout—subject to self-declared raises—and insisted they could do without him. In two years’ time I never met anyone who did.
And so at the end of each month, I waited for the call that always came.
“Mr. Tony? This is Hassan Risk. I have here your May bill for thirty-six hundred bounds. Also, there is my salary for this month. May I come? Insha’allah, I be there in fifteen minutes.”
Insha’allah is the phrase ending all statements about the future in Egypt. It means “if God wills it.” Hassan Risk was the only Egyptian I knew who put insha’allah in front of future plans instead of after, as though God’s will were secondary to his own. Watching from the balcony as he double-parked his fancy Mercedes in front of our building and opened a trunk packed with cables and videos and telephone bills, I often wondered if Hassan Risk was the richest man in Cairo.
6
CAIRO NIGHTS
Dancing Sheik to Sheik
All Mohammedans love a spectacle.
—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The New Arizona nightclub announced itself with a broken window and a sign that read: “europins and jabanese welcome.”
“Don’t worry,” Sayed said. “No self-respecting tourist would be caught dead here.” That was why he had chosen the club, to show me “real Cairo culture.” We had done the Egyptian Museum, the Pyramids, the Khan-el-Khalili bazaar. Belly dancing was the last of Sayed’s “must sees,” and no venue but the New Arizona would do.
There was a picture gallery just inside the door, hinting at the enticing dancers awaiting us upstairs. The snapshots were arranged according to size, as in an elementary-school portrait. Towering above the others was a whale who went by the name of Ashgan. “My favorite,” Sayed chuckled, grandly offering to pay the cover charge. On a Thursday night, the start of the Arab weekend, admission at the New Arizona was eighty cents.
Upstairs, in the dimly lit club, moldering wallpaper peeled from the bar and week-old balloons drooped from pillars surrounding the stage. Though the club was empty, it was impossible to find a table with an unobstructed view. “More poles than in Warsaw,” grumbled Terry, an Australian friend of Sayed’s who had arrived in Cairo that day. As we waited for our beers, a small man in a turban crept out from behind a pillar, slipped a plate of nuts onto our table and vanished. I idly nibbled at a peanut. The man in the turban darted out from behind his pillar again.
“Two bounds,” he said.
I looked at him blankly and said, “Just add it to the bill.”
The man shook his head. “I not work for New Arizona.” He was a free-lancer, like me, hustling peanuts under cover of the club. There was also a free-lance flower seller, a cigarette peddler, and a photographer who snapped our table and returned with a picture so spotted that we appeared to be sitting in a sandstorm. He pointed at a ceiling fan circulating dust and lukewarm air, and shrugged apologetically. The club was a miniature bazaar and we its only patrons, bleeding piasters.
“Don’t let them help you out of your chair,” Sayed warned. “They’ll make you pay for that, too.”
At eleven P.M. the bar began to fill, mostly with visitors from other parts of the Arab world. After several months in the Middle East I had made a hobby of identifying nationality by the cut of a man’s robe, the shape of his headdress, the way he said certain words. The two slim men in blue jeans and black-checked scarves were obviously Palestinian. The small, dusky man with a furrowed brow and a cheap jacket was Yemeni; his jambiya, apparently, had been left at the hotel. Even darker—African-black—were the Sudanese, with their enormous, sloppy turbans. But I wasn’t sure about two white-robed men in red-checked head scarves, who took a table at the front. Even in winter, in cosmopolitan Cairo, they carried a whiff of the desert with them. One man kicked off his sandals and sat cross-legged in his chair, as if on the floor of a goat-hair tent. The other had a dark, handsome face, seared by wind and sand.
“Kuwaitis?” I ventured.
“Saudis,” Sayed said.
“How can you tell?”
“The scarves.” Saudis switched from white to red in winter, while most other “Gulfies” didn’t. “And t
he way they’re being treated.”
Sure enough, their beer arrived in a bucket of ice. The waiter even shooed the nut-seller back behind his pillar and told the photographer to piss off. It was the New Arizona equivalent of red-carpet treatment, the same slavish devotion that the debt-ridden Egyptian government showed Saudi officials visiting town.
Once the newcomers had settled in, a jovial brown-skinned man appeared on the stage, waving a microphone. His threadbare suit matched his skin, giving him the look of a well-worn teddy bear.
“Ahlan wa’salan,” he said. Welcome, most welcome. Then, spotting us, he added in English: “Good night to you. What country?”
Terry immediately yelled “Australia!” and the m.c. broke into song, offering “special greetings” to the land Down Under. Between verses, he looked suggestively in our direction. He repeated the lyrics five or six times before Sayed finally elbowed Terry. “You’re supposed to tip him, mate.”
Terry dug in his pocket and produced a five-pound note. “Anything to stop him singing,” he grumbled. The m.c. pocketed the bill and moved across the stage, offering “special greetings” to the “land of Mecca.” The barefoot Saudi quickly coughed up a ten-pound note. Then the m.c. began singing “black is sweet as sugar” to the Sudanese and “Egypt loves Iraq” to a visitor from Baghdad. Each matched the Saudi contribution.
As the m.c. milked the crowd, band members crept onto the stage and tuned their instruments. It was a weird ensemble. One man banged listlessly at a tambourine, pausing every few minutes to pop what looked like an antacid pill into his mouth. Beside him sat a cross-eyed accordion player. There was also an electric guitarist in shaded glasses, a man with one cymbal, and a piano player missing three fingers on his right hand.
The guitarist plucked his first chord and sent feedback screeching through the club. The m.c. ducked behind a stained wine-red screen, and three acrobats appeared: a lithe boy of ten or so, a sullen girl of about fifteen, and a middle-aged man, apparently the acrobats’ father, who did nothing but shift a card table upon which the boy and girl performed some of their stunts.
Most of the routine was tumbling-class stuff: cartwheels, somersaults, headstands. Then the girl attempted a difficult and bizarre maneuver. Bending back her head, she raised one foot and nibbled at a piece of feta cheese, impaled on a fork held between her toes. As she closed her teeth on the feta, the fork shot across the floor, taking a bit of cheese with it. The girl spat the rest of the feta into her palm, scowled at her father and hurried off the stage, followed soon after by the other two, leaving the card table.
The m.c. reappeared and began prattling in Arabic.
“What’s he saying?” I asked Sayed.
“Special greetings to the Saudis.” This was to become the night’s monotonous refrain, and never failed to entice another ten-pound note from the barefoot sheik’s bottomless billfold.
“This is why we despise the Saudis,” Sayed said, sympathizing with his impoverished countrymen. “We must go begging to the bedouin.”
The band was joined now by a man with a bongo drum who thumped a steady, droning beat. Boom, boom, tac-a-tac. Boom, tac-a-tac. Then a dancer named Fifi sashayed onto the stage, though “dancer” wasn’t the first word that came to mind as she bumped into the acrobats’ card table. Baby fat bunched around the teenager’s shoulders. An elastic bandage covered one wrist. Shuffling across the creaking floorboards, Fifi had the stage presence of an amateur wrestler.
Belly dancing, when expertly done, is a series of isolated quivers in which the performer vibrates her stomach or chest while the rest of her body remains sculpturally still. Traditionally, it is unabashedly erotic.
“Kuchuk’s dance is brutal,” Flaubert wrote of a private show during his journey down the Nile. The Frenchman became so carried away that he promptly escorted the women off the stage, performing a “coup” with one dancer (“she is very corrupt and writhing . . . . I stain the divan”) and another with Kuchuk, holding her necklace between his teeth (“I felt like a tiger”). The women then resumed their dance, so sensually that the musicians had to be blindfolded so they wouldn’t become too aroused to strum their instruments.
There was little danger of that at the New Arizona. As Fifi clunked through her moves, timing her pelvic thrusts to the bongo’s boom tac-a-tac, the musicians looked about as titillated as mummies. The dyspeptic tambourine player even forgot about his antacid pills and drifted off to sleep.
Fifi also wasn’t showing any belly; a gauzy veil concealed the space between her sequined bra and spangled skirt. Sayed explained that ex-president Nasser, who regarded belly dancing as colonial and corrupt, had decreed that dancers cover up. A quarter century later, Islamic fundamentalism had picked up where Nasserism left off. There was now a special squad, called the “politeness police,” moving covertly from club to club and arresting dancers who showed any belly or whose bump and grind was too licentious.
“I don’t think Fifi has anything to fear,” Sayed said, as she thudded across the stage, occasionally glancing at the watch on her unbandaged wrist. The performance was also interrupted every few minutes by the cross-eyed accordion player shouting into the microphone.
“What’s he saying?”
“Special greetings to the Saudis.”
The barefoot sheik approached the stage and stuffed a ten-pound note into Fifi’s bra. She gave him an extra wiggle before scampering off the stage.
I felt bad for Fifi and clapped as loud as I could. This brought a return visit from the nut-seller, the photographer and the flower man.
“That wasn’t so bad for openers,” I said hopefully. Surely Fifi was just a warm-up for the expert dancers still to come. Sayed shook his head. “It’s all downhill from here.”
Dancer #2 looked like the fat woman at a circus freak show. Fat bulged from beneath her shoulder straps and cantilevered over her low-slung skirt. Even without the midriff veil, her navel would have been obscured by rolls of flesh. Belly dancing, it seemed, was not a slimming occupation.
Her dancing was even less enthusiastic than Fifi’s. She also had the disconcerting habit of blowing her nose mid-dance and stuffing the used tissue into the ample cleavage of her spangled bra, beside the ten-pound notes offered by the Saudis. “Good God,” Terry groaned, staring into his beer. “I came eight thousand miles for this?”
Dancer #3, a gorgon named Geyla, wore a skin-tight dress with huge sunbursts exploding on her bottom, breasts and crotch. She didn’t dance at all, preferring to strut across the stage, twirling a baton in the shape of a giant candy cane and poking it in patrons’ faces. It was in the middle of her act, as she leaned down to tweak the nose of the now blind-drunk Saudi, that I made a disturbing discovery: the more obese and abusive the dancers seemed to me, the more alluring they were to everyone else.
Geyla bounced her candy cane off the Saudi’s brow. Then she grasped a handful of peanuts from a nearby table and hurled it in his face. He squealed with delight and stuffed another bill in her dress. The free-lance nut-seller appeared from behind a column to plant a fresh plate of peanuts.
Geyla was offering “special greetings” to some late-arriving Kuwaitis when the club’s electricity gave out, mercifully plunging the stage into darkness. A minute later the lights returned, another dancer took the stage—and police burst into the club. They headed straight for the table of Palestinians, rifling through the men’s pockets and emptying packs of cigarettes and Chiclets. Then they left, taking two of the men with them. The dancing quickly resumed.
I asked a man at the next table what the search was about.
“It is usual,” he said. “They are checking identifications.”
“In Chiclet packs?”
The man shrugged. “I am just the manager here. It is best not to ask too many questions of the police.” The man’s name was Samy Salaam, and he invited me to join him for a beer. The New Arizona was beginning to look like a f
eature story, and I was curious about the manager’s perspective.
“How do you rate the quality of tonight’s dance?” I asked.
He frowned. “Poor to awful,” he said. Ashgan the whale had just taken to the stage. “But it does not matter,” Samy continued. “My customers drink, they joke, they say bad words. They do not know good dance or bad dance.”
Ashgan tripped over her microphone cord and fell. For a moment it seemed the stage might collapse. “She must be feminine, that is all,” Samy said. “Otherwise the men do not like her.”
“And big,” I said.
Samy looked at me quizzically. “Big? These are not big girls.”
The floorboards shuddered as Ashgan hopped from right to left. Was I missing something? Could there be bigger women still to come?
“No, Ashgan is the last for tonight,” Samy said. “But she is still young. There is room for some growth.” He said it the way a football coach sizes up a freshman nose tackle. “Arab men like women they can get their hands around,” he added.
Samy obviously knew his clientele. All around us, men pounded their tables and screamed as Ashgan continued her Richter-scale gyrations. But Samy feared for the future of his business. The government now required that dancers be licensed by an agency called the Department of Artistic Inspection. To placate the fundamentalists, the department had recently stopped issuing permits.