scenes from Cairo nights

For some reason, the summer bus schedule from Zamalek to the new campus is insanely generous, much more so than during the school year itself. For this reason, I am able when I wish to travel to the new campus with the 8 PM bus, arrive there anywhere between 8:45 and 9:00, spend an hour in my office after checking my snail mail (or wandering around the beautiful, ghostly campus itself) and then return to Zamalek with the final 10 PM bus, arriving usually around 11 PM.

I did that again tonight, still hoping to find Prince of Networks out there. Problem: I absentmindedly left my ID card at home. In principle you need the card to get onto campus, but in the dark I walked right on through, and they know who I am anyway.

The bigger problem was that those ID cards double as the office key and as the library access ticket. I peered in the glass window of the philosophy mail room, and was pretty sure I could see a package-sized item in my mail slot, though it’s only a 50-50 guarantee, given the lighting conditions in the mail room and in the outside corridor.

After about 10 minutes I got a couple of security guards there, but after making a phone call to their bus, they had to refuse me access both to the mailroom and even to my own office. Policies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Building have apparently grown stricter for unknown reasons. Perhaps thefts, for all I know. But I had to go out there tomorrow morning anyway, and now I have a potential package to look forward to.

I made the snap decision on the way home to take the Tahrir (downtown) bus rather than the Zamalek bus, partly because I was hungry for some good koshary, and partly because it’s good to disrupt your route home in arbitrary ways now and then, just to keep life feeling fresh. I have always believed this.

Unfortunately, the downtown bus takes the Ring Road, an expressway out to the eastern suburbs that many refer to as “The Highway of Death.” Driving is always bad in Cairo, but it’s ridiculously bad on the Ring Road, and I am thankful that the Zamalek bus takes the much safer Heliopolis route (Heliopolis is the neighborhood, close to the airport, where Plato is said to have studied geometry for some time following the death of Socrates).

And I’m afraid we did come upon a very bad accident. There was a dead body in the middle of the road, thankfully already covered with a colorful carpet. Whether man or woman I could not tell, but the body seemed adult-sized. There was an agitated crowd and an ambulance on the scene. Since the ambulance was already there it couldn’t have just happened, but the emotional state of the crowd suggested some fairly shocked recent eyewitnesses. Most likely someone made the mistake of trying to run across the road there in the dark, unwise given that many drivers here like to keep their headlights off for no evident good reason. In all my years I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a thing, so this obviously provoked a train of thoughts about fragility and also about not postponing the things that we want to do most– a perpetual human struggle, that. There are always new alibis for postponement.

Incidentally, none other than T.E. Lawrence said that “the Arabs are the least morbid of peoples,” and I believe he was right. I have seen highly dramatic outpourings of grief in this city over deaths, but people tend to go through the mourning process in a seemingly quick fashion, and then move on. In the West we tend more often to wallow in deaths a bit more, reflecting on them from numerous subtle angles over the course of months or years. It can be enlightening, but it can also be purely morbid, as Lawrence saw. In general it is safe to say that this culture has a very strong sense of fate that allows people to deal with crushing tragedies in reasonably resilient fashion, and if this has its downsides no less than its upsides, then so too does our own preference for emphasizing the elements of free will and contingency in the things that happen.

I never take the Tahrir bus all the way downtown. Once it turns north and heads parallel to the Nile, it always gets caught in traffic and moves at a speed approximating that of a pub crawl. So, I get off whenever we pass the El Zahraa metro stop. It’s only 5 or 6 stops south of central Cairo, and anyway metro trains are always a shot in the arm for me, in no matter what city.

The stop I always use is Saad Zaghloul, rather than the more central Sadat stop. Saad Zaghloul is one stop prior to that. I like it because it exits onto a dark side street with a huge and spooky political monument across the lot next door (Zaghloul was a key anti-British nationalist in Egypt).

Turning east, it takes about 4 or 5 blocks to reach my former office building on the old campus, New Falaki. The decrepit Old Falaki next door, my initial office building, as well as one of the worst university classroom buildings in human history in purely acoustic terms, and its elevators as small and as reassuring as coffins, has recently been razed and the rubble entirely cleared away. Good riddance. I hated that piece of junk, even though it was home for my first semester in Egypt. The only good thing about it was the nice view of the Citadel of Saladin from some of the upper-floor classrooms. That was admittedly hard to beat, though it could only be seen by the professor, not the students.

The koshary was worth it, as always. The stuff in Zamalek always verges on soggy pasta and slightly old sauce, but Koshary El-Tahrir next to the old campus does a huge volume and always serves up a fresh bowl.

From there, it’s less than 1 US Dollar to take a taxi back to Zamalek. Most rides are routine. On about 1 in 5,000 rides I get a rude driver who lambasts me over American foreign policy. On about 1 in 7,000 I get a driver who actually seems drunk and does crazy and dangerous things. Most rides are unmemorable, but about 1 in 100 are memorable in some good sense. Tonight was one of those.

This driver was a quiet and healthy elderly many. When I first got in and asked for Zamalek, he smiled and nodded, and mumbled something under his breath that I assumed was a Qur’anic invocation for a safe ride, since this is often done. But then I realized that was just his manner of speaking. Like a character in a Shakespearean comedy, he had the tendency to speak in what sounded like rhymed couplets! He would point to a brewing traffic jam, for instance, and mumble something softly that again sounded rhythmically like a Qur’anic passage, but his faintly comic facial expression and flippant gestures made clear that this was not the case. He simply spoke in the way that a wizard chants.

I should also add, regretfully, that all of these incidents took place in an atmosphere of stifling, crippling heat.