A Cairo State Of Mind

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The pollution is staggering: the air is grey with it, the sunlight dappling the twisted trees by the roadside moves with the slow miasma. It rained in the night, the moisture still shines in the ruts and gulleys of the serpentine backstreets and alleys.

Cats dart nervously between cars or feed on the rubbish piled up on the kerbsides, a broken-legged skinny dog whines. Its ribs are stark, skin-stretched.

The traffic grumbles and roars, constantly punctuated by the cacophony of blaring, bleating horns. People weave between the battered cars, squeezed into each other by the press of steel as they scurry or loiter.

Everything's grubby, despite the rain.

The statue of Ibrahim Pacha stands proud on its great block, the leader of Egypt's armies, the defeater of the Ottomans, defender of the realm and much other rot beside. His hand is raised, his mighty, verdigris-streaked steed below him as he looks out over the filthy, crumbling city around him. When it has all fallen in on itself, neglected until it simply collapses under its own febrile weight and the vibrations of the traffic - like an African Jericho - he'll still be proud, still be there. The downtown area is increasingly being bequested to the poor and marginalised as the Money moves out to 'New Cairo', with its Emaar developments and Al Futtaim Malls.

Over lunch at the conference, one of my fellow speakers tried to prod me about how fake and spangly Dubai is. I was too polite to tell him it was the one thing Cairo's brightest and bestest aspire to, so much so they're building a facsimile of Dubai on the outskirts of their fatigued city just as Dubai is building its very own facsimile of the pyramids. Let's swap: your culture for our glamour. Don't forget to spit on your hand before shaking, buddy.

A subway takes you away from the Great Man, steps take you down to pass under the road around the statue. Two men loiter for tips at the bottom. They have a plastic table to rest their prayer beads and ashtray on. There's an escalator going up and two fat old women approach it nervously. One is holding a box of food on her head, the scarves covering them drape over shapeless shoulders. They hop on, grasping for the handrail.

Disaster: a mis-step and their movements become increasingly Lorenzian, catastrophically they reach out for each other and lose the handrail. The younger of the men with the plastic table starts to move, sensing the unfolding tragedy. He's too slow, the ladies tumble, one onto her back, one falling forwards. The box of food goes flying as he belatedly hits the escalator stop button. I catch the food, the ladies wailing and scrabbling at the glass sides of the stairway as they try to heave themselves to their feet. They bat away the vain attempts of the man to help them, calling to God to help them. I right the food box and leave it aside as other onlookers rush to help the howling women.

Coming up out of the subway into the exhaust-laden sunshine, a man with one leg has paused to regain his breath after the climb, his crutches under his armpits supporting him as he fumbles for a cigarette. His clothes are shabby and his trousers shine with dirt.

For three Egyptian pounds, Dhs 0.50, I enter the Hadiqat Al Azbakiyah, the Azbakiyah Garden. It's marginally quieter in here, the traffic outside carving its way around the Great Man presiding over his crumbling eternal triumph. The pathway is a precarious walk, the paving has caved in. The kerbing is worn and shattered, litter and piles of leaves block the pathways. There's a destroyed, inexplicable low building with a collapsing rusty iron balcony at the end of the pathway, an Ottoman era relic clashing with the 1970s architecture of what can only be a toilet block, its slab sides spattered in bat shit. It is, of course, padlocked shut.

There are gardeners here and a grubby-looking heron vies with two crows to get at a small geyser gushing up from a broken pipe as a turbaned man in a gelabiyah hoses down the matte leaves of the exhaust-dusted plants. A group of men loiter around a gazebo. One calls out to me, 'Hello mate, hey buddy.' I wave a hand as I leave them behind.

I wander around, wondering at the unkempt, smashed-up state of the place. Only the Egyptians could break a garden.

Back to the hotel, then, to feed the mosquito in my room. He must be missing me by now...

Caught in the Tide

The guy two cars ahead of us swerved and then suddenly there was an old man in the road, bewildered and scared. The car in front jinked left, right, left. The old man moved, too, but in the same direction each time, a macabre mirror-dance with an inevitable finale.
He held up his hands in supplication, or perhaps negation. The car hit him and then he was high in the air, a ridiculous flight.

He landed on the tarmac beside us, then was behind as we juddered to a halt. I got out of the car. The old man was sitting in the road, his bloody head in his hands, but I was transfixed by the realisation that there was little I could do, here in the middle of the dusty road off the Alex highway. There were men running everywhere and a group of four grasped the pitiful frame as I stood, useless and bewildered. He was stiff and stayed in his sitting position as they lifted him. I had seen this rigor before, a dead old beggar being hefted out of the gutter of the covered souk in Halab. Sometimes Cairo reminds me of Halab in its relentless, remorseless movement of people and goods in the pursuit of marginal gain. And this old man reminded me of that old man, a victim of the tide.

His sandals were still in the road, being run over by passing cars, lorries and buses packed with curious faces pressed to the windows. The driver and I both darted into the traffic to get them back, I saw the old man’s keys, two of them tied together on a keyring with a see-through plastic die on the fob and scooped them up. I handed the keys to one of the bystanders huddled around the old man, sitting by the road in his dusty kandoura, a horrific wound in his forehead where he’d smashed it into the corner of the car window, I remember thinking stupidly how there was remarkably little blood, although his face was streaked with red. They were giving him water and then a traffic cop turned up.
There was nothing more we could do, so we drove off: three silent people in a car together with nothing to say.

Cairene Reflections

Back for the first time in 8 years to this crazy, quixotic, frenetic, noisy, rambling metropolis where Africa meets Arabia. Soaking it all in, delighted by every twist and turn, remembering and celebrating this place that, for two years, was virtually my second home. Dappled light, ramshackle tenements, the placid Nile, scraped and bumped cars, busted sidelights and broken down kerbstones. People: everywhere people, lazing, laughing, running, scowling. Rubbish on the streets, sprawling cables above and concrete cancer eating the facades of slab-sided blocks of flats and the filigreed art nouveau buildings that butt up against them in a dizzying upwards accretion of ages. Everything seems smashed and cobbled together. Here are life’s extremes, rich and poor; sick and hearty, young and old, caught up in the uncaring torrent of traffic and the relentless, pounding tide of humanity washing up against the roads crammed with cars jostling insanely in the orange glow of the dying sun.

My last memory of Cairo all those years ago was crossing the river in a black and white cab, watching a man with his legs severed above the knees beg at the traffic lights, propelling himself on a rickety cart, pushing against the faded tarmac with a stone in his hand. Reaching the other side of the river only to catch a moment of timeless humanity: a good-looking young policeman chatting up a pretty girl, his grin cheeky and hers, cast over the shoulder and flirty, a moment, caught in the sun, of youth and pleasure. That’s Cairo.

Everyone’s on the make, over-eager to grin like a Nile crocodile at the Inglez and take his money. They’re welcome to what little I have, even the blowsy, raven-haired receptionist, caked in make-up and stuffed, like an afterthought, into a uniform bursting at the seams with her bountiful yet grudging charms.

Everywhere you go, you’re ‘Seer’: “Is this your first time in Cairo Seer?”

The Egypt Air Restaurant in the airport hasn’t changed since the 1980s: nothing seems to have moved, not even the display of slightly desiccated yucca plants, their withered leaves more like papyrus than living organism. Perhaps the ceiling tiles are dirtier than they were, perhaps not. As I have so many times before, I sit here and drink a cold beer before leaving.

This time I’m lost in space, looking out of the dirty window and wondering what it is about Cairo, this raddled old whore of a city that I love so much and yet had forgotten that I loved.