There is no anxiety as I walk out of this job interview -- it was an informal interview for an unpaid position that doesn't officially exist. Exiting the office complex, I stride past the paralyzed traffic on the Corniche, weaving around parked cars and stepping over trash, pods of trash between mini-valleys of trash, curled-up cigarette boxes and sickle-cell drink tops, dusty and grey. I feel the beginnings of revulsion and reflexively tamp it down by playing a prerecorded message for my brain: "Cairo is cool."
Then I challenge myself, asking, "It is?" "Of course it is," I respond. "It's big. It's happening. It's a real city." I have walked beyond the thicket of people, so many people out on the street during a workday afternoon. Unemployed? Underemployed? Ghost-employed? Semi-retired? A brown face between a white headscarf and white gallabeya. A tourist couple. Two men in striped short-sleeved shirts rough-housing with a third beside a broken-down car parked on raft of trash.
I renew the internal probe. "But why?" I ask. "Why is it cooler to be here than, say, Davenport, Iowa?" I look at the idling traffic, the idling people. The Davenport Iowa Chamber of Commerce. Rotary Club. Striving for economic development. Aren't we all? "Because there's more going on here," I retort. "People. Activity. Noise." Trash. Stagnation.
I find myself in front of the alleyway that I had glimpsed from the cab on the ride in: In between hulks of grey, red and orange shirts displayed on hangers above cartsful of clothes, an entryway suggesting a row of vendors beyond, in the disappearing lines of perspective. I had commented to myself on the way in, "That's what I love about Cairo," the crowded crazy chaotic mom-and-pop markets that appear unpredictably. But now I wonder if my earlier thought was another pat, preprogrammed message. A public service announcement from the Be Happy with Your Lot Council.
I enter the alley. Bras. Seventies-green shirts, vinyl pants, and bras. Rows and columns of red and purple bras, looming like a sail above and sprawled out in heaps in carts. For a culture so modest about bare flesh, such a public display of lingerie. The road avers, and it becomes apparent that the alley runs beside a warehouse-size textile market, full of booths manned by individual vendors. Shelves of bolts of cloths. Thin towels. The eye is arrested by a gold brocade dress with a high collar. Over there, unfashionable sweaters stretched on hangers and tapering triangularly, arms limp like a straitjackets'.
Ahead the alley abruptly ends, feeding directly into a booth in another warehouse. The road flows sideways in both directions. I go right, wheel the corner, and astonishment opens a vaccuum in my stomach, widening with each step. It is the City of the Dead Car Parts. On the left is a storefront bulging with 200 species of front end. Here on the right is a shed spilling over conical metal engine parts the size of lamb shanks, each standing on end. Further down, a narrow shop is even tighter because both walls are covered with little disc-like metal parts rimmed with wire bristles. It looks futuristic in there. In the back, a small area lit blue where three young men skulk.
I jive over the pitted dirt path, wheeling around puddles, pedestrian tete-a-tetes, and the sudden donkey cart whose bin holds old paperback books on one half, empty green pop bottles on the other. The alley splits again, and I bank left, optimistic that the maze will resolve itself soon enough and deposit me in a recognizable part of town. I removed my necktie when I entered the alley so as to less loudly broadcast my Europeanness, but I'm still walking briskly so that those who notice the novelty of my presence can react only after I have moved out of earshot. Working-class Egyptians are friendly, notwithstanding the Palestinian frustration that is always at risk of attaching itself to their conversations with Americans. I am not really worried that someone will whip a vial of acid into my white face. But I try to avoid being the object of gawking when I can. I can only take so much of "YES ENGLISH-SPEAKING MAN! SEE I SPEAK ENGLISH TOO!"
Streams of people are moving through. Leather-faced men whose eyes show dim recognition at the sight of me are quickly distracted by something else. No incident occurs except for three blurted-out comments on the same block -- "Hello!" "Hi!" "Where are you?" -- in the singsong amused tone you would use if you found a cat sleeping on your car hood. FUNNY MAN WHAT YOU DOING?
I keep moving. A mournful old man sits wake in a courtyard full of axles. Two stacks of fenders ascend a storefront like vines. And more, and every kind of smoky metal, wiped off but smudged beneath the skin, all variations refracted down the crooked alley. In the peripheral vision is the synthetic orange of that PVC tubing that is everywhere in lower-class Cairo, infiltrating construction sites and snaking around tree limbs. I pass a fruit cart with fat grapes. I imagine motor oil covered with dust and trod upon for 50 years.
The juice of the neighborhood seeps through my pores and saturates my cells. Above our heads the rangy window shutters hold their paint in defiance of their cinderblock borders. I am overwhelmed and intoxicated by the flavor and the color of the moment. I cannot catch my breath to fathom the diversity, let alone think of anything beyond this alley. As I pass a slanting black mound of more parts and turn right, I get some epiphany about how, although this is the scary 21st century, and although the overgrown cancerous mob of humanity is so far from home, how nonetheless the regeneration of all organic material, man gathering and arranging and grinding up and remaking, shows that history never sped away from us after all, that it continues in place, and is contained, intact, within this alley.
--October 7, 2002