Cairo

“They are Andalusians. Here studying to be Islamic scholars.” Omar has motioned with his chin to two young men walking towards us, both wearing long sleeve batik shirts and carrying book-laden shoulder bags. The men are short and small framed, youthful dark and unwrinkled skin. Boys, really. I do my best to avoid racial profiling, but these two sure don’t look Spanish to me.

Omar and I have been racewalking through the quiet, empty back alleys of the Khan el-Khalili neighborhood, a labyrinth in the center of old Cairo. Mangy dogs trot by, feet padding softly on cracked sidewalks fronting two- and three-story dilapidated apartment buildings. Most of the windows are clouded and closed. Dingy curtains billow breezily from others. We scramble around corners, duck in and out of buildings, Omar occasionally saying hello to someone he knows. Each road is the same littered patchwork of brick and trash, each corner the same rubbled vestige of the 1992 Dahshur earthquake, each alley latticed by the same tangled, overhead canopy of braided electrical wires. Every few minutes Omar points out what he says are cameras, as if reassuring me of my safety, which, to be honest, I ceded mere seconds into our walk. I am already lost.

“Andalusians?”, I ask Omar.

He slows his pace, turns his head, looks at me quizzically, mimics my question back to me: “Andalusians?”

“Yeah,” I answer, looking towards the two boys, now close to us. “Ann-da-LOOGE-un”. Omar’s face suggests he doesn’t know this word. He says, quietly, “Andalusian” yet again, this time as if it is an afterthought. I now realize he’s saying “Indonesian.” Of course.

I met Omar outside an ancient fortress, me staring up at centuries old minarets flanking even older walls. Omar was leaning casually against a steel traffic barrier, stroking brown prayer beads dangling from his right hand. “That is Al-Azhar University”, Omar said, raising his eyebrows and tilting his head towards the monolith in front of me. “It is a thousand years old and is the best Islamic studies university in the world.” I tell Omar the building is beautiful; Omar tells me he is a student there studying English. “I can show you around,” he offered.

I have traveled enough to know that few things are free. My skepticism must have been apparent. Omar stood up straight and faced me, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket in the process, opening it to reveal a thick profile of paper money. “I am a rich man!”, Omar said. “I don’t need your money. I just want to show you my city.”

I unjustifiably loathe both tours and tour guides. A recurring daymare is to be mistaken for a tourist, be it solo or in the abominable gaggle, all wearing telltale oversized sunglasses and oversized baggy shirts and oversized visors, carrying oversized canvas totes bouncing against oversized pinkish legs, arriving in oversized busses, taking pictures with oversized cell phones, quickly leaving only to replay the scene at the next stop. This, I know, is an unfair sentiment. But any sense of regret is outweighed by my strong desire to blend in with the locals – or at least to not stick out. Plus, guided tours go to tourist markets, cut-and-paste affairs populated with Chinese made trinkets and Turkish made kitschy clothes and locally reproduced replica of occupiers long gone. I don’t want Frida Kahlo socks or King Tut key chains or a fake Iron Cross. I want life in its natural, crude, unburnished habitat. I want dirt soccer fields and smoke-filled cafes populated by old men in funny hats playing dice games vaguely familiar. I want side streets. I want to be side-eyed and side-hustled. I want beggars, con artists, and street walkers to look at me, to surveil, to pause and consider, and to then watch me walk on by. I want to be asked for directions in the local language. I don’t want a TGI Friday’s knock off, I want stalls slinging unidentifiable food or bucktoothed Cuy spit-roasted on handheld sticks or sweaty abuelas plunging bare hands into five-gallon buckets of meat, slapping the contents into a gordita, wiping their noses on their forearms. I want the shits. Or at least to chance it in the chase for tastes unique.

Life – a good life, one challenged and fulfilled, wronged and rewarded – is a constant balance of loss, of gain. Of nothingness or everythingness. The trendy approach is to say “yes” to every new adventure, your reward the joy of learning something new, of feeling something new, of experiencing something as if it had never happened to anyone else on earth. There is danger here, of course. In many places around the world, you as Westerner are perceived as wealthy. Relatively, you probably are. You will always be – are – a potential target for someone. But the risk here is not the risk of being robbed or swindled. The real risk is what you lose by constantly avoiding the risk of being robbed or swindled. Straight and level is great for an airplane. It is debilitating mundanity for a life.

I answer Omar: “Let’s go.”

_____

Cairo is not a city for the faint of heart. She wants your money. Not to suggest that the rest of the world doesn’t want your money, it’s just that Cairo leans into it, with alarming uniformity. At the airport a baggage handler asked for money after pointing me towards a shorter visa line, one for which I was already headed. Another asked for money after failing to wrest my luggage from my hands, another for assisting me in opening the door to my Uber, his hand overlapping mine already on the door handle. In Giza I am asked for money to hold a camel (“no thank you”), to get on a camel (“no thank you”), to take a picture of me if I get on said camel (“no thank you”), to take a picture of me with the Khufu pyramid in the background (“no thank you”), because I have a beard, because my beard is “like an Egyptian”, because my baseball hat is “like an American in Egypt.” One man asked for money after pointing the way to the Great Pyramid, the monument looming over the man’s shoulder like, well, a great pyramid.

In the Valley of the Kings, a short plane ride south of Cairo, tour guides are not allowed inside the tombs. “Guards”, however, are ubiquitous. In Seti’s tomb, one of these guards funnels me behind a flimsy wooden barrier and into a separate room. He is in his late thirties to early forties, the beginnings of a pot belly showing through his galabeya. A second man, much older and skinnier, points me behind a pillar to show me one painting among hundreds in Seti’s tomb. I am awed, not by this single image but by the environment writ large. Colors so vivid they could have been painted yesterday, fantastical half-human gods with falcon heads, ram heads, snake heads, jackal heads. More than sixty pharaohs and other nobles were buried in this valley over a 500-year period, all of whom were sent to the afterlife with jewelry, food, amulets, furniture, clothes, weapons, games – things intended to ensure both safe passage to, and comfort upon arriving in, the Field of Reeds. And, importantly, all things easily transportable. Though many of these artifacts remain safely housed in museums around the world, many more are lost to history’s thieves and opportunists, the Geneva Freeport, oligarch’s basements.

The paintings that remain in Seti’s tomb, an overwhelmingly crowded canvas of limestone bedrock and plaster, are largely unadulterated and uniformly spectacular. Begging the question, of course, of the image’s creation in the first place. Were the painters artists or assembly line workers? Inspired or indentured? Was it passion or simply another day at the office? What is it to create so much beauty, only to bury it?

These are questions to ponder only, as this is an environment as sacred as any other. The appropriate level of dialogue here is none, but the older guard has interests other than my inner musings. After pointing to the image he’s led me to, the guard speaks. “Here,” he says, “is a human with an ibis head.”

No shit my man, I can see that. Plus, I read Wikipedia. Plus plus I am, as we speak, plowing my way through The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. Not only do I see that this is a man with an ibis head, I am also aware this image is of “Thoth,” the god of wisdom, knowledge, and writing; and that Thoth is actually a Hellenization, a Greek interpretation of some unknown ancient word, a name I dare not speak aloud for fear of getting a case of the church giggles as “Thoth” is sure as hell going to sound like “sauce” with a pronounced lisp. I’m good with the basics, I think, but where’s my enlightenment? Spill some gossip about the painter, about Seti, about his affairs both sexual and financial. I want to know if there were children sacrificed in his honor or familial squabbling or whether he had to marry his sister and his daughter(!) to keep the dynasty going and how all his offspring through the ages were born with vestigial tails and nubby thumbs.

I thank the guard politely, then turn to make my way out. The old man remains behind me; the pot-bellied man is now blocking the way. One hand is in a pocket, the other resting on the door jamb, him leaning casually against the wall like a scenery-chewing extra from Indiana Jones. I move closer to him; he does not move. He maintains eye contact, face frozen and emotionless. I move closer to him; again, he does not move. I am now upon him, I could touch his shoulder without extending my arm fully. “Maybe something for me and my friend,” he says. Gangster style.

I had enjoyed my brief respite from persistent merchants while here in the Valley of the Kings, and now it is ruined. I surely would have tipped the old man, but since this guy has had the temerity to ask for money, I am less inclined. Petty, even. So I don’t pay. Nor do I push him out of the way, or yell, or puff my chest, going instead with the more sedate, “I think you blocking my way would be a bad idea for everyone.” The potbellied man laughs, touches me deferentially, says he is “only joking”.

Later in the day, I think about these momentary micro-shifts in power dynamic. Other than a small, uniformed man at the entrance of Valley of the Kings, there was no obvious presence of anything resembling law enforcement. I was the only tourist in the tomb, and there were few other tourists in the park at this early hour. Blocking my way was a bold move, particularly without the guard knowing I wouldn’t have started a fight. Despite my occasional bravado, I’ve instigated no scraps, major or minor, outside of a rugby field. This guy is out here just trying to make some money, so why not give him a dollar or two? Anything. Something to fill another sandbag against the relentless rising cost of everything. Maybe it would pay for his day’s lunch. Maybe it would help him to grab on to the beginnings of a lifeline, to pull himself into a position where he doesn’t have to grovel, to debase, to convince me to buy a shitty t-shirt or an alabaster cat or even to just share some of the contents of those deep pockets of mine in exchange for the generous, selfless act of pointing out an obvious human with a bird’s head in the bowels of a 3,300 year old tomb. Getting asked for money is annoying, but so is poverty.

_____

Omar has exceeded my meager expectations. We visit a bread factory, the workers treating us as if we were invisible, a fog of flour dust haloing the kilns. Omar leads me into a publishing company, Korans stacked ceiling high, where we help to unjam a printer and where I could have watched, for hours, a man as he expertly and furiously pieced together the religious texts. At a food truck I buy a carry-away breakfast of bitingan mekhalil (pickled eggplant) and lamoon me’asfar, pickled lemons I eat with the rinds intact. Omar and I walk, eating our breakfast on the move, through an abandoned lot, under archways, around corners, and up a set of stairs to a mosaic factory. We pass a few storage rooms before a larger room opens before me, holding three or four workers. One man details wooden boxes, another meticulously cuts and sets tiny, ornate seashell tiles. A third seals and finishes the boxes. A broken boom box is held to the wall by packing tape; one man feeds a cat. A young boy walks in and presents me with a tray holding a glass of saffron tea. I watch the tiler, then finish my breakfast and tea and ball up my trash. Omar demands that I throw the garbage over the wall behind me and into the passageway, where it will sit untouched, as if it were in Seti’s tomb. Omar takes me through mostly empty markets, vendors selling spice, carpets, bras, shoes. The merchants seem to know Omar, and I am sure – as is standard practice in much of the world – that Omar will get a kick-back if I purchase something. At an artist’s gallery I am pressured to buy glow-in-the-dark paintings, pieces of artwork that seem nice enough in the light but turn into 1970’s blacklight rock posters when the light is switched off. I am uninterested. I do, however, see a reproduction of The Last Judgment of Hunefer, a 3,200-year-old recounting of the royal scribe Hunefer’s trial to determine whether he is worthy of entrance to the afterlife. I saw the original painting at the British Museum in London nearly a decade ago; it is captivating. Along the top of the papyrus scroll, Hunefer attempts to persuade an audience of fourteen cross-legged gods that he has led a life worthy of eternity. To the right is Osiris, the god of fertility, judger of the dead, ruler of the afterlife. But the crucial moment here is the left-center of the scroll: Hunefer’s heart, in a basket on one side of a scale, a feather from Ma’at on the other. Ma’at was the goddess of truth and justice, and the weight of her feather against Hunefer’s heart is the final test. A heavier heart and Hunefer will be eaten by Ammit, a beastly crocodile / lion / hippopotamus mix; a lighter heart and Hunefer will have proven his worth to Osiris and will gain entrance to the afterlife.

Both Omar and the gallery owner see they have a buyer on the line, so there is not much negotiation. Three millennia ago, Egyptian artists placed something beautiful into a hidden world, and I am not leaving today without a copy of it. I am, unfortunately, light on cash. Omar quickly volunteers to lead me to two different ATMs where I take out the maximum allowed at each. We cross Cairo’s busy streets without incident, something that feels miraculous each time I do it later myself (I quickly learn to time my crossings to coincide with old men and young women pushing baby strollers). We return to the gallery, I buy my scroll, and I am lifted.

At the end of the day, before entering my cab to go back to the hotel, I shake hands with Omar and thank him effusively. “Did I make you happy?”, Omar asks. This strikes me as a weirdly vulnerable question. Of course he made me happy; I just spent two hours sprinting through my own Midaq Alley. Omar waits for my answer, not only holding the handshake a bit too long but also slowly increasing the pressure. I realize I was oblivious to the implication of Omar’s question. Money and happiness are frequently the same when you don’t have much of the former.

There is a psychology term called “displaced anger.” You know what it is, you have surely been both source and target. Displaced anger manifests in your daily life. Anger, like its less combative but no less powerful siblings of disrespect, indignity, and humiliation, is like water: It follows the path of least resistance. It is the reason people scream at their spouses instead of their boss, why they scream at their kids instead of their spouse, why they kick the dog instead of their kids, why road rage happens, why the weak are bullied. I know all this, and later I will feel shame at the words I am about to utter. But at this moment I am tired. I am annoyed, feel tricked, deceived.

“Omar,” I answer, “of course you made me happy. But you are a rich man, and my pockets are empty.”