by Tony Horwitz
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 hef 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 can-tilevered 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 feature 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.
It was the Egyptian way of dealing with sensitive issues. Desperate to cut the national budget, the government wanted to raise the price of bread, but feared this would spark riots. So it had solved the problem by coarsening the state-subsidized loaves—with sand, it was said—so that Egyptians had to buy a more expensive grade. Officially, Egyptians could still get loaves for five piasters, just as belly dancers could still get licenses. In practice, neither was a realistic possibility.
“Someday all these dancers will be old and fat and then I will have no more club,” Samy said. “There is a limit to what customers, even my customers, will pay for.”
Looking around at the tumultuous crowd cheering Ash-gan on, I wasn't so sure he was right.
Sayed left for Australia a few days later, but not before buying a dozen drums to sell back in Sydney. He gave us one, coaching me to bang out the monotonous boom-tac-tac to encourage Geraldine's nascent career as a belly dancer. He thought she had potential. “Eat plenty of basbousa” he advised her, recommending a favorite Egyptian dessert, a cholesterol nightmare of nuts, oil and fried dough. “In a few months, a year maybe,, you could have a very nice figure for belly dancing.”
Before going, Sayed also introduced me to another Egyptian who would become a close friend: a slim, dark Nubian named Yousri. The romance of Yousri's origins intrigued me. Shortly before coming to Cairo, I had visited the British Museum and stared at a frieze pilfered from a pharaoh's tomb called “Scenes of the Conquest of Nubia.” It showed African-looking men swathed in leopard skins, fleeing before the chariots of Ramses II. They became, I imagined, the first of the Nubian slaves. Until I met Yousri, I hadn't realized that a people called Nubians still existed.
Nubia is an Egyptian province near Sudan, in Upper Egypt, so called because it lies upstream on the north-flowing Nile. Several millennia after Ramses swept south with his chariots, the conquest of Nubia was completed, first by crop failure and then, irrevocably, by the flooding of farms by the Aswan High Dam. The temples of Abu Simbel were moved to higher ground, and thousands of Nubian peasants swarmed north to the slums of Cairo.
As rural folk, accustomed to tight-knit village life, Nubians brought with them a reputation for trustworthiness, and they quickly took up residence as boabs, the ubiquitous Cairo doormen who live on the baksheesh they collect for opening elevators, hoisting bags and just generally keeping an eye on things. Perched before every building, sitting on bits of cardboard or on creaking wicker chairs, Nubian boabs in robes and turbans lend a leisurely, almost countrified air to the otherwise hectic metropolis.
Yousri's father graduated from boabdom to caretaker of a city mosque and sent his children to school so they could aim higher. Yousri's mother, like Sayed's, knew little beyond the complexities of raising seven children. “She couldn't'even read numbers,” Yousri told me. “We kids were her eyes and ears.”
Yousri met Sayed at school, and together they studied languages, particularly Hebrew, which enabled them to spend their mandatory military service in a radio room, eavesdropping on the Israelis, instead of in a trench. By the time Yousri finished university, he spoke fluent English as well as a smattering of Turkish, Farsi and French. He had also picked up—through close study of movies, I suspected—a smooth, aristocratic bearing to complement his aquiline nose and skin that glowed like well-burnished copper. Yousri's face wouldn't have looked out of place on the lid of a pharaoh's coffin.
In America, a man with Yousri's assets would have completed his father's ascent up the social ladder, becoming, perhaps, a businessman or professional. In Egypt, he found himself at thirty still living in an apartment with his parents and working the graveyard shift at the reception desk of a hotel near die airport.
“This is the most a man of my background can hope for,” he said, without melodrama, flicking ash from the Cleopatra cigarette he held daintily between long fingers.
Like millions of other Egyptian men, Yousri had tried the alternative—lonely servitude in the hot, joyless cities of the Persian Gulf—and returned home after three years. “I do not like being a second-class citizen,” he said. Though a man could earn three times the Egyptian wage in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, the Gulfies were known for treating their imported labor with condescension.
Yousri also couldn't abide the drudgery of working for the Egyptian government, stamping papers in some outsta-tion of the Cairo bureaucracy. The hotel paid no better than the state, but it offered Yousri the hope that someday, some way, he might do what Sayed had done and meet a woman with whom he could migrate to the West.
“I'm choking here,” he told me one morning after a long night's shift at the hotel. “Just work and sleep and more work. This is the life of a donkey, not a man.”
The only escape I could offer was a sympathetic ear and the occasional decent meal. By Cairo standards, my modest free-lance income made me a pasha, and I enjoyed treating Yousri to dinner at a Western-style restaurant near my home. He always ate slowly and made sure to leave some steak on his plate, lest anyone think he was ravenous.
But after three outings, Yousri turned down my invitations, saying he had to be at work early or that he wasn't feeling well. The subtext wasn't hard to ferret out. Yousri wanted to reciprocate, but taking me to a restaurant of similar standards would have cost him twenty dollars—half his monthly wage. Taking me to someplace less was, for Yousri, unthinkable. He was the proudest man I'd ever met.
So we began meeting instead at the sprawling Khan-el-Khalili bazaar, where we could take turns picking up the tab for sipping tea and smoking water pipes—and rarely spend more than two dollars. Our favorite haunt became Fisha-wy's, a back-alley teahouse that had been open twenty-four hours a day for two hundred years, without evidence of a single renovation. One-bladed fans clung precariously to the ceiling, looking as though they might descend at any moment to decapitate unwary patrons. Century-old dust coated the mirrors and the unflattering portraits of the café's former owners: portly men in Ottoman fezzes, perched on tiny burros. Rickety chairs and tables spilled into the alley, already crowded with peddlers selling papyrus, Korans and hashish. It was there, stirring the coals atop three-foot-high hookahs, that we plotted and replotted Yousri's flight from Egypt, and talked long into the night about women.
“See that one there?” he said one evening, pointing into a crowd of women in modest Islamic dress, promenading through the medieval streets.
“She's religious,” I said. “Off-limits, right?”
Yousri smiled. “Look again. See how tightly her dress clings? And the braid holding her veil? She does not dress this way for Allah.”
Yousri wasn't interested in devout women—or their counterfeit—and he didn't go for makeup and Western coiffures, either. “These women are not real,” he complained. “If they wash their faces you do not recognize them.”
Even the occasional woman who caught Yousri's eye was quickly dismissed as beyond his reach, usually because they looked wealthier than he was, an imposing barrier in class-ridden Cairo. “No middle-class woman will marry the son of a Nubian boob” he said. Women of similar rank posed a challenge as well. To propose marriage he would need an apartment, furniture, a dowry. His brothers had achieved this by returning to work in the Gulf, spending only one month each year with their families in Cairo.
“I do not want to waste the best years of my life in the desert, just so I can marry a woman I will never see,” he said with characteristic dignity. The only other option was to take up residence in the City of the Dead, a Cairo necropolis whose above-ground tombs had become cheap housing for half a million people, many of them newlyweds.
Yousri was, in a word, trapped; too poor to live as he wanted, too proud to live any other way. All the things I took for granted—a wife, my own place, work I enjoyed—were denied Yousri for no other reason than the lots we'd drawn at birth. I made it my mission to equalize the stakes.
With Geraldine, I canvassed single women in America and Australia, thinking of any who might find Yousri a suitable mate, or who might consent to a marriage of convenience. When several of them visited Cairo, we invited Yousri over, on the off chance that some spark would strike. It never did. Each time, Yousri's charm and manners deserted him. He'd either retire shyly or come on much too strong.
“She likes me,” he giddily confided one night on the landing outside our apartment, waiting for the elevator that never came. “I can tell already.” But he was, unfortunately, w
rong. One night, after a particularly awkward encounter, I attempted a bit of coaching. “Ask about her work. Talk about politics. Anything but her legs.”
He nodded. “Maybe she does not like me because I am Nubian.”
“Nonsense. It sounds exotic.”
“Yes, but all anyone knows is that Nubians were slaves.”
“Maybe she's into bondage.”
Yousri smiled, but I could tell he was angry. He was still angry when I met him a few nights later at Fishawy's. “It is easy for you to get to know women,” he said finally, staring into his tea. “It is not so easy for me.”
Or for any single man in Cairo. Few Egyptian families would consent to have their daughters go out alone with a man. Ushers patrolled movie theaters, shining flashlights in the face of any couple daring to hold hands. It was part of Yousri's job at the hotel to make sure that Egyptian couples checking in for the night could give some proof of marriage. If they couldn't, Yousri booked them into separate rooms and another worker made “virtue checks” through the night to confirm that they remained apart.
The most an unmarried man could hope for was a furtive kiss and “brushing”—rubbing genitals with a woman while fully clothed. “Some girls expect a proposal of marriage, even for this,” Yousri said. Then he confessed what I'd already suspected; though handsome and well-spoken, Yousri remained, at thirty, a virgin.
We gave up on matchmaking and tried to get Yousri a visa through other means. This proved equally fruitless. Every Western embassy in Cairo—as in other Third World capitals—was a thinly disguised fortress against visa-seekers. Even tourist visas were unobtainable; it was widely assumed, with good reason, that an Egyptian would overstay a tourist visa and remain illegally. Some Western embassies charged two hundred pounds—twice the average monthly wage in Egypt—just for the privilege of filling out an application. The risk wasn't just monetary. A stamp in your passport saying that a visa had been denied all but destroyed your chances of successfully applying to that or any other Western embassy in the future.