The smell of toast hit us coming in off the desert highway, not quite as nice as the smell of fresh bread, not as bad as burnt toast. My mind had just enough time to ask, "What's the source of that smell?" before remembering, ah, yes, the Cairo smell. Neil and Lisa, the other couple on the bus, were having the same sensory realization, with Lisa wrinkling her nose, muttering about the unpleasant combination of the pervasive toast smell on top of the stark cinderblock buildings and the stretches of desert wasteland here on the outer edge of metropolitan Cairo. Although I could find nothing but bleakness in the post-3 a.m. greyness racing by outside the bus window, I instinctively took the devil's advocate position. "It's better than regular air. It's flavored air," I said smirkily. My wife Marcia laughed, probably pleased that I was defending Cairo rather than making her defend it. Neil talked about the respiratory relief he'd just enjoyed in his native Scotland over the summer, with Lisa adding how much green there was there, another disparaging contrast with Cairo. "Oh, but the bagpipes," I complained jokingly. "The audio pollution there is much worse than a little air pollution." "It's not like there's bagpipes on every street corner," Neil said sportingly.
We directed the bus to the apartment in Maadi, the green, cozy suburban district where they were crashing with one of Neil's fellow teachers. Neil couldn't stand staying in the accommodations the school provided at the campus out in the bare, grey desert, and the driver of the bus that had fetched us from the airport was willing to oblige. Then the bus driver dropped Marcia and I at our place. As I awkwardly directed him around the tree-choked turnabouts, the minor distress of having lost my adeptness with basic Arabic distracted me from the fact that we were back, that the glow of lights from the outer lobby of our apartment building was not a memory, not a diorama or a glimpse of a doll's house, but the physical manifestation of a place that still existed. The lobby was defined against the darkness by a slanted brick wall. The flagstones were still broken on the street side from the brutish passing-by of a utility crew the previous spring, but partially obscured by cement parking dividers. I rode up on the elevator crammed with suitcases. Marcia preferred to walk. After opening the windows to take the edge of the stuffiness of an apartment that had been unlived-in for two months, after restarting the water heater, blowing a fuse, fixing the fuse, and re-restarting the water heater, we collapsed, leaving the bedroom door open knowing no one else would come in. For the first time in two months we were in a bed that was at once long enough for my legs and wide enough for the two of us. Part of that space we would rather have given up if it would have meant that we could have with us immediately the pup who habitually climbed into bed with us and stretched out his legs, nearly pushing one of us off the bed, usually Marcia. Zoser had to stay behind at the vet's in the Midwest for surgery on the leg he'd broke going off a cliff during our honeymoon. We leave the bedroom windows closed and turn on the air conditioner, muffling the sound from outside of a cry. My mind barely has time to ask "Who's shouting at this hour?" before I remember, oh, yeah, the call to prayer. 4:40 a.m. We slept.
3 p.m. We awake. The heat, the lazy breeze, the quiet noises from the street on this holy day, Friday, have a pacifying effect. I am so overwhelmed by physical relief that I laugh out loud in surprise. Can it be this good? I walk to the grocery store in thrown-on junk clothes. The heat is not enough to cause a sweat, but enough to tamp down thought, at least for this jet-lagged brain. Over the gravel on the street, people seem to walk wobbly, relaxed. I am hoping to avoid familiar faces not only because I've lost my small-talk Arabic but because I'm not ready to face the personages of my previous year yet. Need to cocoon first. To that end, I avoid the nearby store where we shop all the time, Miriam Market, and walk a block further to another store that caters to Western khawagas, Gomaa Digla. Just the basics. This store doesn't have the Egyptian brand of pancake mix, so I buy some overpriced imported Pillsbury, suppressing my consumerist guilt. Skim milk, cherry juice, grape juice, drinking yogurt for Marcia, cream and pita bread for the spinach curry that I always make (no tofu today, so mozzarella to substitute for the paneer), a chocolate pound cake, a two-pack of toilet paper, asparagus and pomegranates, and a copy of the English-language alternative weekly that somehow gets lost on the way home. Add two boxes of drinking water, and the bill comes to more than 100 Egyptian pounds. A mere 21 U.S. dollars if we were converting, but not so good if you're an underemployed freelance journalist who is broke in every sense except that his wife has some money, and not so good for a couple that just blew most of its wedding cash on emergency veterinary procedures and airfare, especially considering this grocery run does little to replenish our staples. But let's put that out of our mind today, please. It's the weekend, and we need time to recover from our summer vacation in the U.S.
The air is clear down here in Maadi, especially up on the seventh floor, the toast smell diminished to just a faint hint of soot, and even that vanishes within hours as our noses adapt. The dry heat, the look of tile, the coat of dust that settled on a plastic bottle that was untouched over the summer, all produce flashbacks from a year ago, the first time I came to Cairo, when the transition was so jarring. That time, Marcia picked me up from the airport and the taxi broke down in the City of the Dead cemetery section (the driver tapped something under the hood with a wrench about 10 times and we were off again). Then, in the darkness I perceived that Maadi was some sort of cinderblock housing project, and the dust and scent of burnt was distracting. In the morning I woke to an exotic bird call and presumed it was a quintessential Egyptian sound. In fact, it was the pet bird of the landlord upstairs and came from who-knows-where; I haven't heard its like anywhere else in Egypt. The glare of the sun unfiltered by clouds made the shop fronts seem so bright. Marcia came back at lunch with two fellow teachers and took me to lunch. The main business street of Maadi, Road 9, with cars parked on both sides left barely a single lane for traffic, yet delivery trucks and taxis were making three-point turns in a constant swirl. I assumed this was a quintessential Egyptian street, while in fact the tidy shops, thin pedestrian traffic, and generous tree cover overhead mark it as a middle-class area.
Taking a shower this time, I flash back to the shower in that first apartment where we stayed with Marcia's friend for a while during the first year, before it became clear that we were too much of a couple to cohabitate with two strong-willed single roommates. Pink tile, no cabinets to hold the items set on the floor like a small bucket with a built-in tray. An ironing board was by the door, blocking the hooks that held someone else's towels (Oops, we hadn't brought any towels). Then the sink with someone's earrings and a laundry pin in the soap dish. On the ledge of the opaque window behind the toilet sat small boxes of Egyptian-brand laundry detergent (oops, we didn't own any detergent), labeled in English on one side, Arabic on the other, although neither side warned me that the detergent with the blue box was intended for whites, leaving minute bleach marks in the color clothes that I washed with it. In between the sink and toilet, the washing machine (no dryer, but the air is so dry that line-drying is only a small inconvenience to which we soon become well-adapted). Not realizing that the washing machine locks for 10 minutes or so after each load is completed (an inexplicable safety measure), I force the little plastic handle and break it off, producing the first conflict of our brief roommate relationship. On the other side of the room, the bathtub, so narrow that while standing for a shower one must stay mostly still lest he wander up onto the curve of the bathtub wall and lose his balance. The shower curtain hangs on a rod that sags down at a worse-than 45 degree angle. I fixed that by screwing a hook into the ceiling and looping a chain around the hook and shower rod, a home improvement I hoped would somewhat counteract the washing-machine handle incident.
This time, we came home to an apartment that's empty except for us. Too empty, without the pup. He'll be here in 9 days. We try not to miss him too much. We eat pancakes. I go on the roof to reattach the jury-rigged phone line, which the Telecom Egypt repairman wriggled together by hand and left exposed. Have to do a permanent fix one of these days. We unpack, have a little QT, do a little e-mail, and suddenly the day, having started so late, is falling. I look over the laptop out the window, over the tops of the mute apartment buildings adorned with satellite dishes and the occasional cinderblock hut. The sky is quiet, cloudless, warm. Some noiseless music is sewn into the still wind. Life is slower here, compared to the American panorama of suburban subdivision and roadwork and upscale strip malls from which we just emerged. I smile. Can it really be this easy? So it seems.
--August 31, 2002