Bloomsday in Cairo: Pigeons and Prizes

Some people prepare for travel to Egypt by reading those dismayingly heavy travel books put out by Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, DK or (if you're elderly or English, the two being nearly synonymous) Frommer's or Fodor's. Others go shopping, which, if they're shopping nearly anywhere in the western world, is almost certain to leave them with a suitcase full of inappropriate clothing. Some people diet and others enroll in a language intensive. I read fiction and watch movies.

I did buy a Lonely Planet guidebook, but I gave it one try and put it aside. It will come in handy if I ever write a book about Egypt and need statistics about elevation or the height of the pyramids or the preferred Anglicized spelling of Sharm al Sheikh. The fact that travel books are, per square inch, the heaviest books to roll off the presses has always eluded my version of common sense. That heavy, glossy paper not only makes them expensive, it makes them prohibitive to carry.

Egyptian movies are hard to come by in the US. "The English Patient" and "On Cairo Time" are both good enough to watch repeatedly, but they're not actually Egyptian. "The Yacoubian Building" has that creepy little actor who loves Mubarak as its star. I read instead the great classics of Egyptian literature, mostly Naguib Mahfouz, but a little of the country's more recent literature, that of Alaa al Aswany and Ahdaf Soueif, for example. I have never felt better prepared for a visit to any foreign country.

Mahfouz, in particular, was an unbeatable guide to his people. Mahfouz lived in Egypt nearly the whole 20th century, keeping a home in Cairo for nearly all of that time. His work goes much deeper into Egypt though, way back to the Pharaonic era. I read it all, so there was little of life in Cairo that took me totally by surprise except the craziness of traffic and the dryness. These are both elements that factor into every single moment of life in Cairo, so pervasive no Cairean even thinks about either anymore. It, the consciousness of these, would be like a New Yorker being conscious of the way residents of that city treat visitors or asking an Angeleno how bad the Los Angeles smog is or how heavy traffic on the interstate.

The weather in Cairo seems uniformly perfect. I wasn't there in August, when temperatures are at their peak, but even that month seems to be manageable with a fan. Unlike life in the desert southwest of the USA, air conditioning is not common. Storefronts are left wide open, as are apartment windows if they're up a few floors for safety. You can walk around comfortably at any time of the day or night in any month of the year. And so I walked. I walked and walked and walked. Except for a few times I thought I would die crossing a multilane road full of speeding little cars all honking like the band on (Islamic) Judgement Day, walking was the perfect way to see the city. Well, that and the time I convinced my driver to take me deep into the heart of Cairo, where he warned me no American woman should go. That was one of the few times in my life I ended up being grateful for the steel and chrome of a good old Japanese car.

But that will be another episode.

My favorite day in Cairo was spent walking around the el-Khalili district of Old Cairo. It's known as a tourist destination now, but it's also home to many hundreds of thousands of Caireans, and along its narrow, twisting roads, in its hidden stairways and tiny shops is the Cairo Mahfouz described so well in his great Cairo Trilogy.

This was the perfect summer to be in Cairo. The January Revolution succeeded not only in deposing the Tyrant Mubarak but in bringing tourism to an absolute standstill. I was pretty much the only tourist in the country, which was as great for me as it was lethal for the economy. I would raise my camera to take a picture and when I was done turn around to face a bankful of Caireans casually stashing their cellphones after having taken my picture. I have to suppose that in previous years, a head of blonde hair was not so rare. If I was better at keeping a scarf tied I'd happily have covered my head, but I don't seem to be too good even at keeping my hair pinned up, let alone covered.

Or perhaps it was my camera that drew everyone's attention. I shoot with an SLR, an older Canon digital model that still requires that one hold it up and focus through the viewfinder window. My friends back home had cautioned me not to look too much like a journalist in view of the female journalist who was sexually assaulted during the revolution, but if you use a camera like this, you can't help but look suspiciously like you know what you're doing. In any case, I never had the least bit of trouble with anyone because of my camera unless you count the police who several times chased me out of sacred religious or military compounds.

But in el-Khalili, there were no police in evidence, at least in the immediate months following their shaming in the people's revolution of this winter, and I was free to take pictures of everyone. Occasionally I bought something, to make sure good will was maintained as well as my obligations to everyone back home. A belly dancing costume, extremely beautiful and glittery, for the little girl next door. An Aladdin's lamp, brass and certainly full of magic, for her big sister. And an elegant carved cane for my elderly father for which the negotiations took nearly an hour.

But the highlight was all Mahfouz. Walking down a skinny little street, my friend and translator Haytham reached out and touched my arm, then pointed skyward. "Amina," he told me, with his eyes twinkling happily. "Mahfouz's Amina."

The second story of the ancient building had huge windows taking up nearly the entire streetside wall. They were covered completely, in a way that made American maximum security prisons look like pleasant courtyard apartments. I'm putting a picture of the main window up for you here. If you've read any Mahfouz or almost anything about historic Cairo, you'll know what you're seeing here: the mashrabiya panels. This is how they covered the windows of the homes of the wealthy Caireans so that the women who were kept indoors could look out down to the streets below without being seen by any of the men who were allowed free passage there. In Mahfouz's great trilogy, Amina is the female head of the family who lives almost her entire adult life shut behind these closely gridded windows, in this iron cage like a bird.

I had hardly recovered from this sight when Haytham beckoned me to follow him down another tinier lane, up a flight of stairs,

through several more merchants' spaces ("No, shokran, not today, shokran," I would smile as we sped past them.)He came to a stop inside a restaurant. "Hungry?" he asked, that same mischievous light glinting in his eyes. I was suddenly ravenous. An elegantly attired man ushered us into an equally elegant back room with deep mahoghany walls and lush red carpeting and waiters spaced along the walls in their immaculate red jackets and Turkish fez caps. Again, one became aware of the lack of tourists in town. I vowed to order excessively, both because of hunger and my American cultural debt.

Then I saw the framed photographs on the wall and picked up a expensively printed flyer propped on the table by the menu. We were in Mahfouz's favorite restaurant, the place he'd frequented, now named after him, the country's only Nobel Prize novelist. The waiter and Haytham both laughed to witness my surprise and visible sense of wonder.

The laughter changed from manly to giggly when I asked in my bumbling Arabic, "Bathroom, please?" not realizing the waiter was about to bring me a blissfully hot steamed towel to wipe the city dirt from my fingers. "Bathroom?" I repeated. "Hamana?"

"You just asked for pigeon," Haytham grinned. "And they may well be able to serve you what you ask for," he finished, as the waiter managed to tone down his laughter to a very nice and sympathetic smile.

It was the best meal I had in Cairo, and I was so exhausted by the time I ate it, so replete with happiness and depleted of everything else that I can't even tell you what I ate now.