The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  2 pills at a time whenever nece necessary

  Before fucking make love 20minutes

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “In the trash,” Sayyid said. “From a man who died.” He told me that the man was elderly, and had lived down the street. After his death, his sons threw away the pills and other possessions. “Many of these things were mish kuaissa,” Sayyid said. “Not good.”

  I asked what he meant by that.

  “Things like this”: he sketched with a finger in the air, and then he pointed below his belt. “It’s electric. It uses batteries. It’s for women. This kind of thing isn’t good.” But talking about it seemed to make Sayyid happy. He told me that the trash had also contained Egyptian sex pills and a large collection of pornographic magazines. He didn’t say what he had done with those things. I asked where the dead man used to work.

  “He was an ambassador.”

  I had been studying Arabic for less than a year, and Sayyid’s tone was so matter-of-fact that I asked him to repeat this. “He was in embassies overseas,” Sayyid explained. “He was very rich; he had millions of dollars. He had four million and forty-four dollars in his bank account.”

  The precision of this figure caught my attention, and I asked Sayyid how he knew.

  “Because it was on letters from the bank.”

  I made a mental note to be careful about what I threw away. Sayyid asked for details about the Chinese medicine, and I did my best to translate the part about waiting 20 minutes before fucking make love. He was vague about what he intended to do with the drugs. I checked the ingredients—white ginseng, deer antler—and decided that there probably wasn’t any risk. I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be the first time he’d taken a pill out of the garbage.

  After that, Sayyid began stopping by regularly with questions. Over time, I realized that there are a number of people he’s recruited as informal consultants. He’s illiterate, like more than a quarter of adult Egyptians, so if he wants to read something that he pulls from the trash he goes to the proprietor of H Freedom, a small corner kiosk. If he finds himself involved in a neighborhood dispute, he calls on the man who distributes government-subsidized bread. My own field of expertise ranges from foreign things to sex products and alcohol. If somebody throws away a half-finished bottle, Sayyid checks with me to see if it’s imported and thus might have resale value. He’s Muslim, but not particularly devout; when he stops by at night, he often asks for a beer. He’s the only guest I’ve ever had who carries away his empties, because he knows he’ll end up collecting them anyway.

  In part because he can’t read, he’s skilled at picking up on subtle clues. He hand-sorts all the garbage, and at one point he noticed that foreign women often throw away empty packs of pills whose number corresponds to the days of the month. Sayyid concluded that they were an aphrodisiac, and he asked me if they have the effect of making foreign women desire sex on a daily basis. I explained that this isn’t exactly correct, although the assumption was understandable, because Sayyid finds a large number of sex drugs and paraphernalia in the trash. A couple of times, he’s brought by other forms of Chinese sex medicine, and he shows up with drugs that have names like Virecta. Anything blue catches his eye—recently he appeared with a half-finished foil pack of Aerius, which excited him until I went online and learned that it’s an allergy medication that happens to be the same color as Viagra.

  I live on Zamalek, the northern part of an island in the Nile that’s situated in central Cairo, and Sayyid has become my most reliable guide to the neighborhood. Occasionally I accompany him on his predawn rounds. The first time I did this, in February of 2013, he led me to the top landing of the fire escape of a building on my street.

  “This is Madame Heba,” he said, grabbing a black plastic garbage bag and tossing it into a huge canvas basket perched atop his back, Quasimodo style. He descended while engaging in a running commentary about residents, whose names I’ve changed. “This is Dr. Mohammed,” he said at the next landing, and then he climbed down another level. “This one’s a priest, Father Mikael. He’s very cheap. He gives me only five pounds a month.” He heaved two big bags. “He says he doesn’t have any money, but I see all the boxes and bags from the gifts that he gets. People give him things all the time, because he’s a priest.”

  On a different floor, we picked our way across a landing covered with rotting food; a pile of trash bags had been ripped apart by stray cats. “This one’s a foreigner,” Sayyid explained. “I’m not supposed to touch her garbage. The landlord isn’t happy with her; there’s some kind of fight. He told me not to remove her trash.” Sayyid said that this isn’t unusual: people can tip him to remove trash, but they can also tip him to allow somebody else’s garbage to accumulate. We descended to the next floor, where he remarked that the resident was a Muslim with a drinking problem. “There are always bottles in her trash,” he said in a low voice. By way of illustration, he ripped open the bag on her doorstep and showed me the empties: Auld Stag whiskey and Casper wine. He did the same thing with a bag at a building across the street. “This is Mr. Hassan,” he said. “He’s sick.” Sayyid tore open the plastic, rooted around inside, and pulled out a pair of used syringes. “I think he has diabetes,” he said. “Every day there are two syringes in the garbage. He takes one in the morning and one at night.”

  Sayyid’s route twisted through a maze of fire escapes that climbed through narrow, chimneylike atria. Periodically a stairway led to the roof of a building, where the gray streak of the Nile was visible two blocks away. Zamalek is a relatively prosperous part of Cairo, and it has always attracted foreign residents, but there are also many middle-class and even poor people, because rent-control laws keep the price of some apartments as low as a few dollars a month. As a result, landlords rarely make improvements, and old buildings have a kind of fading glory. On my street, many structures were built in the art deco style, with marble lobbies and beautifully patterned wrought-iron grillwork along the balconies. It’s common for apartments to have a kitchen door that leads to the fire escape, like mine.

  Sometimes an early riser will hear Sayyid working, and she’ll open the kitchen door to greet him and offer a cup of tea. One morning I was with Sayyid when an elderly woman handed him four hamburger patties that she had carefully prepared in a plastic bag for his lunch. In Cairo, where many basic services have developed informally, and where there’s a strong culture of tipping, people tend to be generous when somebody is working hard. This is one reason that Sayyid dresses so poorly—he knows that dirty, ill-fitting clothes are more likely to inspire generosity.

  And the information that he gathers from the trash helps him interact with residents. In addition to the door-to-door collection, he sorts garbage in the street, collecting it into piles that are hauled away by trucks. He greets everybody who passes, asking about spouses and children, and he’s particularly attentive to details of health. On his early-morning rounds, he comments on whether a resident is receiving injections, or taking medicine, or wearing diapers. If something seems particularly interesting, he’ll open the bag for my benefit. Once Sayyid stopped at a landing and whispered that the resident was a sex-crazed Lebanese man. Then he ripped open the trash, found a discarded bottle, and asked me to read the label: “Durex Play Feel Intimate Lube.”

  Sayyid’s conversations revolve around the three fundamental forces in his world, which are women, money, and garbage. Often these things are closely connected. In the beginning, it was Sayyid’s father’s unquenchable passion for women that led to his son becoming a zabal. Sayyid’s father worked as a watchman on the outskirts of Cairo, where he embarked on a rapid series of marriages and divorces. All told, he went through nine wives, or ten if you count the Christian woman he married briefly before Sayyid’s mother. Nobody seems to know how many children he fathered, but it was too many to support, and he died when Sayyid was six. As a boy, Sayyid never attended a single day of school, and by the age of 11 he was
working full-time as an assistant to zabaleen.

  Despite this difficult childhood, Sayyid speaks fondly of his parents. And in his ancestral village in Upper Egypt residents remember his father in almost mythical terms. They say that at heart he was a true Arab, a Bedouin, a man of the Sahara; and thus he was fated to restlessness. The villagers also make it clear that they don’t count the Christian wife.

  Sayyid eventually found work as an assistant to a zabal named Salama, whose life in garbage was also inspired by an abundance of women. In Salama’s case, there was only a single wife, but she gave birth to eight daughters and no sons. “He didn’t do anything his whole life other than prepare his daughters for marriage,” Aiman, the husband of Salama’s oldest daughter, told me once. Aiman runs a small recycling business, and like many zabaleen he has a nickname: Aiman the Cat. “Other people build buildings,” Aiman the Cat said of his father-in-law. “He built daughters.” When Salama died and there was no son to pick up his route, it was loaned to Sayyid. He’s allowed to collect the trash, but he has to pick out all paper, plastic, glass, and other resellable commodities and give them to Aiman the Cat.

  They have no formal contract, but it doesn’t matter, because Cairo’s waste collection is shaped by tradition, not by laws and planning. The system began in the early 1900s, when a group of migrants arrived from Dakhla, a remote oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert. They became known as wahiya—“people of the oasis”—and they paid Cairo building owners for the right to pick up garbage and charge fees to tenants. In those days, much of the garbage was flammable, and the wahiya used it as fuel for street carts that made ful, the fried beans that are a staple in Egypt.

  Inevitably, Cairo’s population grew at a rate that upset the delicate balance between trash and beans. In the thirties and forties, a new wave of migrants began to come from Asyut, in Upper Egypt. They were Coptic Christians, which meant that they could raise pigs that ate organic garbage. The Christians subcontracted from the Muslim wahiya, who evolved into middlemen, managing access and collecting fees. The actual hauling and sorting was done by the Christians, who became known as zabaleen, and who made much of their income by selling pork, mostly to tourist hotels. The government played no role in establishing this system, which worked remarkably well. Social scientists often cite it as a success story among developing-world megacities, and in 2006 an article in Habitat International described it as “one of the world’s most efficient resource recovery” systems. It was estimated that the zabaleen recycled roughly 80 percent of the waste that they collected.

  But the system became a victim of dysfunctional national politics under the regime of Hosni Mubarak. In 2009, during the worldwide epidemic of H1N1 swine flu, the Ministry of Agriculture decreed that all Egyptian pigs had to be killed. There was no evidence that pigs were spreading the disease, but the government went ahead and slaughtered as many as 300,000 animals. Some Egyptians believe that the decision was driven by a desire to appease Islamists, who had become outspoken critics of the regime, and supposedly hated pigs even more than they hated Mubarak. But the policy backfired, with hundreds of furious zabaleen taking part in protests. They also started tossing organic waste into the streets, because it had no value without pigs. The declining hygiene of the capital and the unrest of the zabaleen were part of the general unhappiness that culminated in the revolution, in January 2011.

  For Sayyid, none of this—the people of the oasis, the wandering pig-raisers, the Exodus-style slaughter carried out by a dying regime—is exotic or unusual. He doesn’t believe that there’s anything particularly complex about the relationships he has to negotiate in order to gain access to trash. In Zamalek, he collects from 27 buildings, which are subcontracted from 7 individuals. One is Aiman the Cat, the zabal, who is Christian, and the others are Muslim wahiya who are known by nicknames like the Beast and the Fox. The Fox allows Sayyid to handle seven buildings; the Beast grants him one. Another wahi has been dead for a decade, but his son, a government clerk, retains rights to the trash, so he subcontracts to Sayyid. There’s also a dead wahi who left a widow, so Sayyid is obligated to send her £E100—about $14—a month. Periodically he checks to see if the widow is still alive, but he wouldn’t dream of cutting her off, out of respect for the sacred link between women and garbage.

  He keeps track of all this, and the monthly tips of more than 400 residents, by memory. And he’s constantly acquiring peripheral information that can be leveraged into baksheesh. A few years ago, Sayyid was hauling trash late at night when he saw the daughter of a doorman returning from university with a boy. Believing that they were alone, they kissed. “Since I’ve eaten with her father and mother, I didn’t like what I saw,” Sayyid told me. “So I told the father.” Undoubtedly Sayyid thought that the doorman’s gratitude would be of some benefit to him, but this was a miscalculation. The daughter denied everything, and the doorman barred Sayyid from collecting the building’s trash. At that point, Sayyid called upon the owner of H Freedom and the man at the local bread kiosk for help, but their intercession only convinced the doorman that the story was spreading. He gave the garbage rights to another zabal, and now Sayyid says that he should have minded his own business.

  It’s rare for zabaleen to do hard labor into middle age, and Sayyid, who is 40, has chronic pain in his back and his knees. He expects that within the next decade he’ll be unable to continue, but he doesn’t know what to do next—he often describes himself as stupid, and fit only for the work of a donkey. But in truth his job requires him to be observant and perceptive, and he must interact with the full range of Egyptian society. In particular, he has to be sensitive toward Christians, who dominate the industry. The first time I accompanied him to his neighborhood to watch a soccer match at another zabal’s home, Sayyid prepped me with a list of things that I should and shouldn’t say, so that I wouldn’t offend his Christian sensibilities.

  One evening Sayyid stopped by my apartment to chat, and my wife, Leslie, and I began talking about a rich and notoriously stingy woman in the neighborhood. She’s middle-aged and well educated, but she never married, and I asked Sayyid why.

  “There’s a proverb,” he said. “‘If you befriend a monkey for his money, then tomorrow the money will be gone, but the monkey will still be a monkey.’ That’s what it was like with her. Nobody wanted to marry her.”

  I remarked that the woman is also obese, but Sayyid shook his head. “She used to be pretty,” he said. “I’ve seen pictures of her from fifteen or twenty years ago. She looked so different. Beautiful!”

  “Where did you see the pictures?”

  “In the garbage,” he said. “She threw them away.”

  I asked why he thought she had done that.

  “Maybe she didn’t want to remember those times,” he said quietly. “Maybe the pictures made her sad.”

  Sayyid himself married late by Egyptian standards. When he was 29, he arranged with some neighbors to marry their cousin, an 18-year-old named Wahiba. She came from a village outside Aswan, in Upper Egypt, and she was educated, having attended a trade school after high school. She moved to Cairo to be with Sayyid, and they soon had two sons and then a daughter.

  On the seventh day after the daughter’s birth, Sayyid invited Leslie and me to his home for the traditional celebration that’s called the sebou. We took a cab and then a microbus out to Ard al-Liwa, an area in northern Cairo that includes a number of ashwa’iyat, or “informal” settlements—illegally built slums. Sayyid’s ashwa’iyat is dominated by garbage collectors, and we walked through narrow alleyways full of trash that was in the process of being hand-sorted. There were bags of glass bottles, stacks of old rags, pallets of crushed plastic, and piles of rotting vegetables that would be used as goat feed. In one spot, a man had picked dozens of pieces of bread from the garbage and laid them out to dry; eventually they would be fed to water buffalo. Everywhere we walked, we could hear rats rustling through trash. But the homes were made of concrete and brick, and were relativel
y well constructed. This is generally true of Cairo, where about two thirds of the population lives in ashwa’iyat. David Sims, an urban planner who is the author of Understanding Cairo, has pointed out that the capital’s slums have a functionality and permanence that’s rare in many parts of the developing world.

  Before visiting Sayyid’s home, I had had the notion that it would be furnished largely with things from the garbage. In Zamalek, he’s always showing me discarded objects that still have value, and once he told me that the bread I’d tossed out a day earlier had been perfectly good—he’d taken it out of my trash and used it to make sandwiches for some friends at H Freedom. So I was surprised to find that virtually everything in his two-story apartment was new, and for the first time I realized how effective Sayyid had been at inspiring tips. He usually earned nearly $500 a month, which was about twice the average household income in Cairo, and his apartment had cost more than $30,000. He had two televisions, and his couches were still wrapped in factory plastic. A computer was being installed for the eldest son, Zizou.

  When we entered, we were greeted by Wahiba, who was another surprise. She was strikingly pretty, with fair skin and a heart-shaped face, and she wore blue eye shadow and dark eyeliner. She was slender, and dressed in a long white gown embroidered with beads; it was hard to believe that she had given birth to her third child only a week earlier. She greeted us warmly, and we chatted for a few minutes, and then she politely excused herself. A few minutes later, she returned in a niqab, the full head covering that is worn by conservative Muslims.