We’re rolling past dusty aluminum sheds marked for airline shipping departments and government offices, looking for anybody who can help us get our dog out of customs. We are cruising the so-called Cargo Village on the outskirts of Cairo International Airport, a clump of warehouses that looks like it got forgotten about a couple of decades ago. There’s nobody here except the occasional security guard giving non-useful directions to our taxi driver.
Shabaan is our regular cabbie, and we kind of like him, but we’re irritated at present because he made an unannounced stop on the way to the airport to get a shock-absorber part replaced. The mechanic worked right on the street, so it didn’t take long. Shabaan paid the guy 20 Egyptian pounds, handing him the bill across the open engine compartment. Marcia and I watched the transaction from the back seat, staring at the windshield like we were on a movie date. Or held hostage.
Beyond the warehouses, I spot what we’ve been looking for, a brand-new building, the Lufthansa Cargo building, where we should find the employees who told us to come there to pick up our dog. They said it should be just a fee for the paperwork, then a customs fee, hard to say how much that will be. We hurry into the building and find that is empty. Brand new, doors wide open, and nobody home. The window frames are unpainted. There are construction supplies laying around. Next to it, another building with a big, brand-new Lufthansa Cargo sign. Empty.
On the street, a guard points at his watch: a little past 5 p.m.
“Friday,” the guard says. “Everybody leave.”
He squints at the sight of us, two people trying to do business in this abandoned zone warehouses while the sun sets on a Friday, the Muslim Holy Day. The day of rest.
Oh. We shouldn’t have had his flight arrive on a Friday. We are dumb foreigners.
“What happens if we can’t get him now?” Marcia asks, teetering toward panic. “They won’t just keep him overnight,” she says. Our brains spool for an image of what happens to a dog in a warehouse if no one takes responsibility for him. She’s ready to cry.
Cursing, I run back to the Lufthansa building, thinking, I don’t know what I’m thinking, what, maybe there was an employee hidden behind a cubicle divider the last time I checked where we couldn’t see him or her, so we have to get back in there right now, because if they are still there, and it’s 10 minutes after 5, well, they’re probably already gone, but, due diligence. Marcia and I each take a building. I shout, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” too many times, because the echo is so total, you can hear in the way it refracts back to you that the sound waves haven’t encountered any human bodies. What happens when a dog shows up in a warehouse ghost town and the owners are too late to get him? And it’s Shabaan’s fault for making us stop for his goddamn shock-absorber part. Bastard threw the empty box right on the street corner. “Made in Turkey.”
Outside the empty building, a car pulls up. A man in a white shirt pops out and waves. What self-deluding fool would harbor hope that it’s the Lufthansa man? But it is. He apologizes profusely: He’s the only one on duty and had to deal with a flight that came in late, he’s so sorry.
Danger averted! He wants a 110-pound fee, whatever, sure, there you go. He points us toward “Gate 35,” back in the Cargo Village. That’s where your dog is. You’ll pay the customs and then you’re done. “Sorry I can’t come help, but I’m very very busy and I’m the only one on duty,” the guy says. No, no, not at all, don’t worry, I’m sure we can handle it. And indeed, inside the black gate labeled “Gate 35,” a forklift brings over a fiberglass cage containing Zoser, half-bulldog, half-boxer. In minutes Marcia is crying at the happy reunification, hugging this creature who’s thrashing and licking, dazed and relieved to be out of the cage. She kneels as he rears up, chafing her cheek with the coarse pad of his paw, and she laughs. He looks bigger, longer, or, no, wait, he’s lost weight. The leg he broke on our honeymoon looks great, looks really healed, or wait, at that angle it looks fucked-up and deformed. The leg bones still have pins in them. They’ll come out and the leg will look normal, I’m sure, or else he’s fucked up and will need more surgery. Zoser pans his head around the circle of white-jacketed guards who are looking at him, five of them, plus the forklift operator and two bureaucrats leaning out the window of their office, amused, curious, repulsed. Who are you looking for, boy? Don’t you recognize me? No, he doesn’t. Definitely doesn’t. Has he forgotten us? Christ, I hope not. Then why doesn’t he show some recognition?
I absentmindedly look at the guards and snap out of it. Oh, yeah, we don’t actually want to stay here in this holding area. We want to go home.
I look at one of the guys and cheerfully, with American exuberance, utter the Arabic word for finished. “Khallast?” I ask.
“Wait one minute,” one of the white jackets says.
A bureaucrat works out an estimate for the customs fee. “Something like 400 pounds,” he says. A third of a month’s rent. Whatever. Reasonable enough.
The following exchange rates are in effect in the Cargo Village:
One minute = five hours.
Something like 400 pounds = 1,200 pounds, plus every piece of currency we had on our persons, Egyptian and American, and then some.
In short, we got fleeced, gutted, buttered and batter-fried.
How does this happen? It’s a Friday, well after five o’clock, and the few workers that came in had mostly gone home, according to those that remained, like the dozen fellows lounging on broken curbs inside Egypt Air’s chain-linked enclosure in the Cargo Village. I walk into the compound, leaving Marcia with the dog at Gate 35, thinking I’ll be right back after I obtain the necessary customs form by using my infant-level Arabic ability. It’s supposed to cost 10 pounds. The first guy I talk to springs to his feet. He is now my personal assistant. He will accompany me for as long as I remain in the Cargo Village. I didn’t ask him, but he’s certain he needs to be there, and it’s so helpful, and I’m so clueless as to the protocol, how could I resist?
He is Adel, early 20s, with piercing eyes and a narrow mustache. Adel is from Customs. He’s in bumming-around-the-house clothes but shows me his government employee ID card. He only speaks Arabic, speaks it too quickly, and he just won’t slow down no matter how many different ways I form the Esperanto hand signals for “slow down” and “use present tense only, please,” so I take him back to the Shabaan in the taxi. Shabaan only speaks Arabic, too, but as a cab driver he knows how to speak Arabic to foreigners who don’t understand Arabic. Slowly. Baby talk. Nodding supportively.
Adel knows a guy who can get me through customs. It’s very fortunate that I’ve run into Adel, I am assured by Adel. And as he climbs into the taxi and directs Shabaan to the very end of the Cargo Village, where the highway exit ramp begins -- there he is, there’s the guy, a dude who is just exactly at that point stepping across the imaginary line that separates the Cargo Village from the highway and heading off into the new evening, this is the guy, in a pinstriped long-sleeved shirt and glasses. We are very lucky that we caught him before he left, he will tell me after he climbs into the cab. This is Miki, who works for Customs, according to the laminated document in his soft leather briefcase.
Adel appealed to Miki on my behalf. Thank God, as it turns out, Miki knows a guy, Mamdoub, who knows where to find a doctor who can provide the signature necessary to officialize the paperwork. But this doctor wasn’t in the Cargo Village, as the Lufthansa said he would be. This doctor was back at the passenger flight terminals. This is a bit of a drive. So suddenly it’s a goddamn “Wizard of Oz”-size troupe jammed into Shabaan’s cab, the shotgun seat going out to Mamdoub out of necessity, since he is a Bluto-sized and somewhat surly individual, with me squeezed in cozy with my new helpers Miki and Adel in the back.
Miki says he needs 200 pounds for the doctor. Sounds reasonable. While I wait with the cabbie, the three tromp off into a building by the terminal.
Insert interminable waiting periods into any point in this narrative.
I’m sitting there in the parking lot with Shabaan, parked at the end of a row of cars in a non-authorized non-spot, our view of the drab, grayed-white office building obscured by some drab giant cylinders, some industrial something. I’m remembering a scene from a movie where someone’s sitting in a car in a parking lot and someone comes up and shoots them, a hit. I’m remembering that I was in this very parking lot on a previous visit to Cairo International. That time, Marcia and I were lured from the terminal by a man who said he was a taxi driver but who, as it turned out, had no taxi, just his personal wood-paneled car, no meter, no taxi lights, no luggage rack, no license, nothing. He still tried to gouge us on the fare.
Shabaan complains that this really stinks to be working for so long on a Friday, he normally doesn’t work Fridays, except to make this special trip for you. Later he complains about how many cab rides he could be pulling in if only he weren’t stuck here, there’s always tons of fares going from Heliopolis to Maadi on Friday evenings.
The trio reappears. Back to the Cargo Village. We drop Mamdoub back at his building and he taps the window roughly, demanding his tip from Miki. Miki, looking stressed, says he’ll come back, he’ll come back later, as we proceed down the roadway. Miki says he needs 200 pounds. But I already … I said. Yes, but that was for …
It’s a heady feeling, trying to decipher the shadowy proceedings of a system, realizing you ought to have figured it out in advance, while it’s not-quite explained to you in Arabic. I paid 20 pounds for a damgha? and 180 pounds for a bettery. There were markups, margins of error, roundings-up, tips being charged to my account for people I never saw who were not named.
Across the street, as we spectate from the cab, Miki can be seen walking to an office on the left side of the Egypt Air enclosure, then, a minute later, running full-speed to an office on the right end. He reappears and dashes across the street and down the block to the mosque-like building where we dropped off Mamdoub. Then back to the Cargo Village. Runs to the left. Slaps a piece of paper on top of his stack. Runs to the right. Another piece of paper. The more I itemize how much he ran around, the better I feel about how much money he's taking out of my possession forever.
After Miki disappears to handle one of the items on the paperwork checklist, Shabaan turns around to face Adel and me in the back seat. Shabaan is our homeboy, our stand-by regular cab driver, a role he seemed to grow into naturally. Marcia and I liked his jokes, his raspy squeaky voice, his beady eyes flickering with kindness. He started showing up every morning around the time Marcia needed a cab to work and eventually became her official every-morning driver. Rarely late. Reasonable rates. Liked our dog, showed us pictures of his kids. We were a little weirded out when he showed up in the vestibule on a Saturday morning just to chat, but certainly, a kindhearted guy.
Now Shabaan wants to tell me something about the new acquaintance sitting next to me in the back of the cab. Adel is good man, Shabaan offers. Adel, who, incidentally, has given no indication that he’ll ever give me change after he asked me for a 10 and I gave him a 20, smiles humbly and offers thanks. Isn’t that true? Shabaan asks me. Sure, yes, you bet, I say, nodding, and while Adel is doing a bow with his head, Shabaan looks at me dead-on and tells me: Give him money.
I feel like a new front has opened up in the war on my finances. I didn’t immediately recognize Shabaan’s deadpan tone, the same matter-of-fact manner he had used that evening some months back when he had Marcia and I over to dinner with the family at their 100-pound-a-month apartment in a crowded working-class neighborhood. His wife filled us to overflowing … chicken, fish, stuffed peppers, flat bread, and when I asked how we could repay the kindness by bringing something back from America, Shabaan answered without hesitation: “I would like a bicycle for my son, and for me, a mobile telephone.”
It’s just a perception problem, I concluded. When Adel leaves the cab a few minutes later to assist Miki in the paper chase, I give Shabaan the talk I’m been meaning to give him since I first began to understand his funhouse-mirror view of us.
“By the way, Shabaan,” I say, since by the way is one of the phrases that I know in Arabic, “in America, I am not rich.”
He nods automatically, sympathizing, saying, yes, he understands, people in America are not really so rich.
“No, no,” I interrupt. “There are rich people in America. But I am not rich.” I pause. “I have no money in the bank,” I add.
Shabaan absorbs this pensively. A little while later he is my advocate again. “If Miki and Adel say, ‘Give me more money,’” he says, “say no!”
Miki emerges from the enclosure and, running back to Mamdoub’s building, he waves Shabaan to park closer. Surely it must be almost finished. The sky is dark purple. Marcia. I left her with a bunch of strange men. Oh, she’s OK. Is she wondering where I am? Surely. But she presumably is just waiting, realizing that the nature of waiting is that it does not end when you want it to, and that the only way to wait is to wait, even in the state of unknowing. I hear a scream … a little girl, just playing in some apartment or squatter unit somewhere.
We’re waiting for Miki to reappear, and the stoic approach is hardening into bitterness. Shabaan is reflective.
“Egypt is bad,” he confesses.
Why, I ask? “All the people only want money,” he says, frowning.
I adopt a mollifying tone. “Well … but, there are so many people here,” I say. “And not much money. People just want …”
“ … money,” he interrupts.
“No, people want to eat. People want an apartment. People want…,” I continued, my love of my fellow human beings surpassing my Arabic vocabulary, “ … clothes.”
We’re beside the parking lot of the Cargo Village, now empty of cars, and in the sallow light cast down by a few poles, there are 13 teenage boys playing soccer, the goals marked by broken bricks. Who are they? Where do they live? They live here, Shabaan says, and gestures beyond the warehouses.
I look over their heads and glaze out, remembering another time when I felt trapped in a moment that would not end, that the action I was undertaking, through some glitch, would not necessarily reach a terminus but would continue, treadmill-like. That was when I was visiting a town in Normandy after college and walked out to the ocean, an ill-advised distance for so late in the evening. It was so dark when I finally got to the beach that I only touched my toe in the water and immediately turned to the long walk back. Tired, resigned, I walked on, and after a long passage of time I realized the roaring sound I had been ignoring was not automobile traffic; it was the ocean. Which meant I had not been walking back inland to the town with my hostel, I had been walking parallel to the ocean, away, away.
So I turned around and walked forever. I walked timeless, because it was too dark to read my watch, not really too tired, a little tired, legs not weak, strong enough to just walk. I would comfort myself by imagining how things would be once this was over, and as I walked I’d close my eyes to make the scene more vivid: Me, opening the door of my room at the hostel, throwing open the door and facing the pristine-white bedsheets like a lover. Tucking in, sleeping, and someday in my successful future, regaling friends with the story of how I once got lost in Normandy, telling a table full of friends how I was so full of ennui that I walked with my eyes closed and daydreamed about a scene just like this, guys, telling the story to all of you. But then I opened my eyes and I was still on the road.
That moment did end, but there was something about the solidity of the experience that still makes me imagine sometimes that I never did escape that tape loop, trudging along dark all-the-same field road, still walking, always walking, as if, because I did it too long in the wrong mindset, that part of me is stuck there.
I look over the parking lot and realize the kids aren’t really playing soccer. I thought they were because they have a soccer ball, because some of them are wearing the right sort of shorts, but in fact, there is no game going on. Some of them are not moving, or are walking far away from the playing area. I hear my name and see an arm sticking through a gate holding a document. Adel. Sign here. He disappears. Eventually the kids are actually engaging in the sort of kicking and school-of-fish swarming that more directly resembles a soccer match. The goalie stands between two decapitated pieces of concrete, and the ball flies past him, bouncing and rolling far to the other end of the parking lot. I am comparatively closer and could run out and throw it back to him, save him some effort. Shabaan could, too. Neither of us moves.
It ended. The moment turned out to be finite, and the end arrived. We were disgorged from the murky corridors of after-hours customs. It is just a memory now, how Shabaan’s eyes widened as Adel and Miki squeezed out all my money, how they persuaded me to borrow 130 pounds from Shabaan himself as a short-term emergency loan. All traces have washed away of the astonishment that slapped me when, five hours and 1150 pounds later, in that final moment before Miki deposited the final completed papers with the customs authority who would finalize the whole deal, while Miki held in his hands the bundle of his forms and my cash that would end our long evening in the Cargo Village, how Miki turned level to me and said, placidly, firmly, “Now you will pay me and Adel 300 pounds.” Involuntarily, I snorted. He cursed. Fortunately, they had already cleaned us out, including all the small bills in Marcia’s purse, so I could only give him everything I had left, 35 pounds and a five-dollar bill.
Shabaan dropped us off at our apartment just shy of six hours after he’d picked us up.
The final indignity.
I hand him three hundred pounds fetched from the apartment. Minus the emergency loan, that’s a 170-pound fare, which is 50 pounds more than what I judge to be the standard rate for going to the airport and back and idling for five hours. A good night’s wage for a Cairo taxi driver. That’s for you, I say, and, hoping to head off any protest over the amount, I throw in a bag of pretzels and a bottle of water. He hasn’t had dinner.
What about 30 pounds, he says. Fine, 30 pounds, I’m dazed and not up to haggling. All I have is another hundred, so I pull it out and say, “do you have 70?” He pulls out a wad of small bills, counts out loud to 70, moves the stack toward me, then, does a last-minute rescue of one of the tens, which goes back in his pocket. “Sixty, OK?” he says. So he’s claiming another 10-pound tip. Whatever, whatever, I think, my fatigue dampening the urge to fight fraud.
I walk away toward where Marcia is walking the dog. I count the change he just handed me. It’s not 60, like he said; it’s only 50. Meaning, even as he was boldly taking an extra 10-pound tip to my face, he was pocketing another 10-pound tip on the sly, and all this seconds after I conceded a 30-pound surcharge on top of the original 50-pound tip. He lied, maybe.
This is my last stand. I walk back to him with a confused look. “This is 50,” I say.
“You want four?” he says.
Confusion wells in my head.
“No, I don’t have change,” he says, dipping a hand into a pocket. “No change.”
My fatigue resurges and I walk away.
--September 22, 2002