Between Terror and Tourism. Michael Mewshaw
ideas about Egypt don’t discourage you on your trip. There are good things all across North Africa. I even like Libya. I don’t feel like a stranger there. I like Morocco—Casablanca, Marrakech, Fez. I went there and it seemed like an open society.”
Out of courtesy I asked about his current writing projects, and his comments about our profession sounded sadly familiar. Does there exist a writer in the world who, regardless of his fame or fortune, doesn’t feel he’s been fucked over by editors, writers and reviewers?
“My publisher in Beirut steals from me,” Meguid said. “Every year he reprints my books, but says they’re still in the first printing. The American University in Cairo makes translations into English, but it has bad distribution.”
“I’m sorry. I admire your work and hope you have better luck with it.”
This elicited a chuckle. “You know what Hemingway said? He said, ‘If I was born in Africa, I would not be Hemingway.’ He had a big powerful country behind him. It’s hard when you don’t have that. It’s hard when you write in Arabic. But we go on, don’t we?”
He signed my copy of No One Sleeps in Alexandria and urged me to send him copies of my books. “I can’t buy them, I don’t have the money.”
The Cecil Hotel boasted a Chinese restaurant on its roof, but I had no appetite for anything quite so exotic as Alexandrine-Cantonese cuisine. I wanted ... not home cooking, but something vaguely familiar. I asked the concierge about the Greek Club, which was reputed to have excellent mezzes and seafood and exhilarating views of the harbor. Since Greeks had once formed a sizable minority in the city-they had numbered almost one hundred thousand—I imagined some expats had lingered on, congregating each night at the Club for ouzo, rembetike music and nostalgic conversation.
But the concierge discouraged me. He claimed the Greek Club was far away and overcrowded. “You’ll need a reservation and a taxi.”
“I thought it was on the Corniche.”
“Yes, but at the end, near the fort. You shouldn’t walk. After dark, the streets aren’t safe. I’ll call and book a table, and reserve a taxi to take you and bring you back.”
The price he quoted, fifty Egyptian pounds, about $ 10, was a princely sum in a country where half the population earned less than $2 a day. It occurred to me that the concierge might be hustling for his cab-driving brother. Still, I figured it was worth ten bucks not to get lost or mugged.
The taxi proved to be a rattletrap Lada left over from the ’60s, when the Russians made common cause with their Pan-Arabic socialist brothers and bestowed battalions of technical and military advisers on Egypt. A hole in the Lada’s floor allowed me to look down at the racing Corniche. It also allowed toxic gusts of carbon monoxide into the car. Coughing and spluttering, I groped for the window. The handle was missing. The driver noticed my distress and dug a window roller from the glove compartment and handed it back to me.
While I hung my head out for air, he bombed along as if in a demolition derby. Only when he spotted a traffic cop did he slow down and loosely drape the seat belt across his shoulder. For a couple of blocks we crept along at twenty mph. Then he discarded the belt and stomped on the gas. Nothing I said could slow him again. Cyclists, pedestrians, horse cart drivers all panicked as he zipped past. Even other cabbies were alarmed.
We barreled on through Anfushi, a poor neighborhood that Durrell had described as a nest of streets with a “tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each other’s mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks.”
A hammer-headed peninsula separated the eastern harbor from the western harbor, and at its point where the lighthouse once stood, Fort Qait Bey looked like a freshly baked pastry topped with towers of meringue. There the cabbie had no choice but to stop.
“Greek Club,” he declared.
“Where?”
He indicated a dilapidated building. “Upstairs,” he said. “I wait here.”
“Don’t bother.” Head swimming with exhaust fumes, I paid him in full and sent him off, figuring I’d rather risk walking than asphyxiation.
Nothing identified the building—no number, no sign. Through an open door, a room was visible, along with several men who lounged on folding chairs, fingering worry beads, mesmerized by a television. Wearing striped galabiyyas, long, loose robes, they might have been in pajamas, settling down for the night. Much as I hated to invade their privacy, I asked, “Restaurant?”
One fellow cocked his thumb toward some stairs. I started climbing, though I had little faith that I’d find food. But then on the third floor, the walls brightened with murals of islands and blue skies and whitewashed villages, and I arrived at a reasonable facsimile of a Greek taverna. Not a lively establishment-there were very few customers and none who appeared to be Greek-but at least it was open for business.
I took a table on the terrace, caressed by a breeze. Lanterns necklaced the harbor, and painted boats floated like confetti. Through a long lens and in flattering light, this was the optimal view of Alexandria’s charms. I might have been gazing at an aging movie star filmed through gauze. I marveled, as I would many times in the next few months, at how, depending on the hour or the air density, the North African light changed and in the process altered your very understanding of light and how it could scramble a landscape and your head.
I ordered hummus, tahini, tabouli and grilled calamari, and washed it all down with cold Omar Khayyam white wine. Say what you will about the quality of Egyptian vintages, but the exotic labels—not just Omar Khayyam but Obelisk and Sheharazad—were wonderfully evocative. After a few sips, the day’s glum start was forgotten, and I veered toward full-blown, manic sentimentality. When the waiter brought a honeyed wedge of baklava for dessert and said that he loved America and would like to live there, I exclaimed, “But it’s so beautiful in Alexandria!”
This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. I suppose he was hoping for help with a visa.
Though well fed and fortified by Omar Khayyam, I left the restaurant feeling skittish. This wasn’t Baghdad or Beirut; it wasn’t even East London or Brooklyn. But it was Egypt at night, a Muslim city, and I was a white-haired, white-faced American walking the crowded streets alone.
From two previous trips to Egypt, I recalled hordes of hotel touts, scheming shopkeepers, anti-Israeli agitators and boys who professed to be students but offered their services as guides, pimps or sexual partners. But this night was blessedly free of that hands-on, full-court press. Nobody badgered me to buy. No one called out, “Hello, America,” or cursed me as a khawaga, a foreigner, or as a nasrani, a Christian.
Along the stone waterfront of the eastern harbor, boys played soccer under street lamps. On the seawall, young couples—girls in hijabs and boys in blue jeans—sat watching them. At the western harbor, whole families from infants to grandfathers luxuriated in the bracing April air. Cafés had set out tables where people drank tea and smoked hubbly-bubblies. A waiter invited me to have a seat, but nobody else noticed my presence. Kids whooshed by on scooters and bikes. Laughing teenagers dared one another to dart to the end of the quay where waves crashed over the jetty in a frigid spray. Middle-aged married folks lugged plastic chairs from the cafés out to protected coves and watched the stars.
Heading back toward the center of town, I walked on and on, telling myself I’d catch a cab at the first sign of trouble, the first time anyone got too friendly. Or too hostile. But block after block, I felt nothing from the crowd except benign indifference.
On the Corniche my late-night ramble turned into a contact sport, a kind of body surfing, as Egyptians flowed around me, into me, over me. To a claustrophobe, this might seem menacing, but I didn’t mind, and gradually the realization came to me that within the chaos of an Arab mob there was an intrinsic order, within the apparent irrationality there was a logic.
Still, I thought my good luck couldn’t last. If not in Egypt,