The Great Fire of Road 200

Hearing a scream in the midmorning was not unusual in itself. In Cairo, someone is always screaming. Like the Russian woman who lives on the south side of our building who yells someone’s name repeatedly every afternoon, beseeching, screeching, increasingly irritated. Or the construction-site kids hollering at each other, or kids crying because they don’t want to go to bed or because they’re up too late or whatever.

But this contained certain terror. The sound of someone in peril. A woman. What she was screaming was: "Khedri!" That’s the boab’s name. Moreover, the scream emanated from just below our apartment.

I struggled with the window screen until it gave way, and I stuck my head out. Couldn’t see anything. So I pulled on my pants and ran down a flight. On the landing, four Egyptian women were conferring in distraught tones. One held what looked like a bottle full of red sauce with a bottle opener clamped onto it. The woman held out the bottle to me -- could she really be this distressed about being unable to open a bottle of sauce? Then a younger woman spoke in water-clear English:

"There is a fire in the bathroom."

She gestured to the rear apartment. "Here?" I said, pointing in that direction. "Yes," she said, loudly but with remarkable calm. I crossed the threshold into the living room of the apartment. My vision was hazy, and I imagined for a moment that it was full of smoke, but it was only dark from having the shades drawn. It had been a hot morning, and my brain had been simmering in its juices for a few hours. My feeling of being in a sluggish dreamscape increased as I pushed through a curtain into the even darker kitchen area. In the apartment’s internal hall, I turned a corner toward what I sensed was the source of the panic. For a moment I was unsure in which direction to proceed. And then, in the bathroom, I saw it:

The tiniest fire.

A yellow glow emanated from under the washing machine, which sat slightly elevated on a stand. It was a flickering like the pilot light of a furnace. I slid the washer to one side, revealing a little blob like a pool of candlewax with a single flame dancing in it.

Dulled in the puce gloom of the bathroom, I grasped for something to combat the fire with and found -- a loufa, long like a baseball bat. I drubbed the fire with it.

Instantly, the flame was quelled. I felt a flush of success and knew that I had saved the day. But wait: There was still a glow coming from under the washer. Visible through slots in the metal, another radiant glob of yellow. Inside the machinery, in the base of the washer. Inaccessible.

One of the women appeared, produced a peewee fire extinguisher, pointed it and: No pressure in the damn thing. Someone handed in another peewee fire extinguisher: No pressure. A third one only spritzed out a slight mist of dust. The yellow glow inside the washing machine continued. The women returned to the hall to cower. A crusty maid zipped and took away a pile of laundry from atop the washer. Practical, I observed; and quite coolheaded given the presence of a slight glow in the base of the machine suggesting a fire.

In moments like these, they say: "Every second counts." But this fire was so far from out of control, so not terrifying, it was more like, "Many of these seconds are expendable." "In fact, take a minute off if you’d like." I relaxed and allowed some time to elapse. Everything was the same, despite the hysteria of the women hovering in the hall. Still, it was hard to deny that there was something not quite right about a flame inside the bottom of a washing machine. I was nagged by the thought that it could spread and do something undesirable. I tried to picture the possible consequences. The image was vague.

I reached for the showerhead. The English-speaking woman looked in and noted that this was an electrical fire, so water should not be used. Oops: right. I knew that. I was supposed to have learned that in Health class in high school, right? No, no -- surely it was earlier, grade school. What subject did they stick that into? Just a minute: I thought it was grease fires that you’re not supposed to use water in putting out? Because it splashes the grease around. "Are you sure?" I asked the woman. "Yes," she said.

Another fragment of grade-school fire ed came to me. Inspired, I asked the Anglophone woman: "Do you have flour?" She looked at me blankly, then said, "Like for making a cake?" A glimmer of recognition crossed her face. She fetched a bag of flour or cake mix or something. I tried to scutch some of the stuff on the fire, flinging it through the slot. No effect.

Time marched on and the crisis remained at about the same level. Blacks gusts of smoke did not engulf the room.

I probably would have struck on tilting back the washer and pouring the flour down the slot, but suddenly there appeared the savior that the tenant had been crying out for in the first place: Khedri. Khedri, stubby, with his wormy mustache and Members Only jacket, groggy, rattled, nervous, very likely awakened from a late morning nap, probably shitting a brick as he scuttled up the stairs, thinking he had let some tenant die. In his arms he was toting yet another peewee fire extinguisher, which he aimed and fired. Take a guess. "Mish shagal (It doesn’t work)," he moaned, for the benefit of the tenant and anyone else who had witnessed his humiliation, his brow heavy with a sense of victimization. A buddy of his who had tagged along handed him another, slightly bigger extinguisher: No dice. Absent-mindedly, I reached up and pulled the washing machine’s electrical cord out of the wall socket.

And then, the cavalry showed up. All I saw in the haze (real or imagined) was the blue shirt with the company name on the patch on the breast pocket: seavins. It was one of the security guys who stand on the street guarding the company opposite our building. now holding a jumbo fire extinguisher, gleaming red. Advancing right behind him, trusty as any superhero sidekick, was the boab who gives boabs a good name, Imam, a courtly gent with a near-handlebar mustache suggestive of Super Mario Brothers who works the building opposite. One blast from Jumbo and the tiny inferno was history.

In an instant I realized that I had become superfluous. The bathroom and corridor now held at least four males with semi-official status, be it boab or guard or boab’s buddy. So I left. Shoeless, with a slight film of fire-extinguisher dust in my alimentary canal. I clapped Imam on the shoulder as I left.

I walked out and saw the not-so-scared eyes of the six-year-old girl who lives in the apartment. Then I realized where I was. If that was the apartment below me, then it was the home of the muezzin who sings the call to prayer at all hours, day and night, over the P.A.. system of the nearest mosque. The call to prayer was, during my first few months in Cairo, just an abstract irritation, just some disembodied tradition of Islam that woke me up in the middle of my prime r.e.m. It took human form once when I took the dog out for a walk at, like, 5:45 a.m. because I was already awake, thanks to the call to prayer. As we exited the elevator on the ground floor, there waiting to ascend was the guy I had seen before in a gray business suit. Except this time he was wearing a ceremonial robe and skullcap. Balding, stern, dignified, with sharp eyes and close-trimmed beard -- stubble really. A real live caller-to-prayer. And he lived in my building!

The next time we rode the elevator together, I decided to chat him up. I introduced myself to him as one of his neighbors. His reply was curt. "You’re the one who lets your dog run around." Without a smile. "We can hear it right over our head." A real cold front set in. At a loss for words, I made an involuntary choking noise, softly, until he exited, a floor below mine. That’s how I figured out he lived right below us. Only days later did I conceive of the appropriate retort. "Oh yeah?" I would have said. "Well, you wake us up every morning with your loud singing. Why don’t you cut that out?" Or something like that.

Perhaps out of passive-aggression, I persevered with politeness when we’d both show up in the elevator at the same time. On some subsequent elevator ride, he relented. With a genuine if wearied smile, he asked: "How is your ‘small’ dog?"

Swear to God, the very day before this fire, when I was listening to yet another call to prayer, as the cacophony of cantors at all the mosques across the urban canyon swelled, the cries droning and overlapping, in that chorus I swear I suddenly picked out one discrete wail, raspy, scratchy, and I realized it must be the singing version of the voice that I knew well as a speaking voice, that of the muezzin who lives below us. Why had I never picked it out before? As he sang, the image of his salt and pepper beard-shadow came to me.

A couple days after the pitiful fire incident, I rode up with the muezzin again. When he saw me his stern look crumpled. "It was you that helped my wife during the fire," he said, a statement, with only a hint of a question. "Really, it was no big deal," I said, self-deprecating but also embarrassed to have been involved in such a non-event. "It really wasn’t much of a --"

"Thank you for looking after my family," he said, staring at me with piercing, humbled eyes, then looking down. He got off and the elevator door closed.

--2002/2003