Streets of Cairo

I arrived at the American Embassy in Cairo the same month Jimmy Carter was sworn in as President of the United States. I got off on the wrong foot with Cairo and never found a better one. “Tomorrow is Friday, but you’ll have jet-lag,” my new boss said. “I’ll send a duty driver for you on Monday.” However, stomach cramps, diarrhea, and fever hallucinations, Pharaoh’s revenge, immediately overtook the jet-lag, and I was unable to report for work until another week later. Then came the Baladi Bread and Butagas Riots.

Egypt borrowed money from the World Bank, where heckuva job Bob McNamara, of Vietnam fame, was president, and the brightest and best there recommended Egypt abolish price controls on baladi bread, flour, rice, cooking oil, and butagas. From Alexandria to Aswan, rioters took to the streets, hundreds killed, more injured. Along the main road from Cairo to the Pyramids, Islamists attacked the gaudy nightclub venues of alcohol drinking, casino gambling, and belly dancing. President Sadat declared martial law. Rioters shouted, “Where is our breakfast?" and "Nasser, Nasser." After the riots, the Egyptian government took it all back and reinstated the price controls.

On the first morning of the protests, I had gone to the Embassy without noticing any difference from every other day of chaos on the streets of Cairo. By 10 a.m., my boss dragged an army green footlocker from the secured vault into the office and unpacked its contents in front of his four-man staff of teletype operators. He spread across a desk an olive-drab webbed-belt, a leather holster embossed “U.S.,” and a .45 caliber semi-automatic M1911A sidearm. He hooked the holster to the belt and sheathed the pistol. A metal ammo box contained incendiary grenades, in case of emergency destruction of classified documents. The boss opened the main filing cabinet. “Pull the pin, toss it in, and run like hell.” To me, he said, “You’re riding with me.”

My boss drove a 1973 Plymouth Fury, still in its prime as a huge hunk of steel and V-8 horsepower. We rode out the front gate of the Embassy, past the Shepheards Hotel, and down the Corniche El Nil. At the first bridge, a crowd gathered. My boss stopped the car in the middle of the street a block away and shifted the transmission into Neutral. “Roll up your window and lock the doors,” he told me. The crowd advanced towards the Plymouth. Some carried rocks in their hands and lengths of iron pipes. “Hold on to your ass,” my boss said. Angry faces began to come into focus. My boss stomped on the accelerator with the engine still in Neutral. When the RPM needle pointed to 12 O’Clock High, he dropped the gear shift into Drive, screeching tires and raising a trail of blue smoke and the smell of rubber. He aimed the Plymouth Fury steel and horsepower at the middle of the mob. The accelerator pedal was still flat on the floor at 60 MPH, when the crowd parted like the Red Sea. At my front door, the boss said, “You just stay home until I send for you.” There was no telephone service. The next time the duty driver came for me, I had been in Cairo three weeks and had worked one full day and part of another.

Sadat’s government survived the bread riots, with a lot of help from his friends, until the assassins got him in 1981. Mubarak was his vice president. Mubarak has ruled Egypt for 30 years without a vice president but now has decided he needs one and has chosen his not-so-secret police chief, a trusted torturer. Meanwhile, Mohamed ElBaradei a United Nations bureaucrat living in Europe, got a sudden urge to participate in Cairo street riots, and American television immediately elected him “the opposition leader.” Remember Benazir Bhutto, educated in Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford, England, twice Prime Minister of Pakistan and twice run out of Islamabad on a rail, suddenly homesick for Pakistan again when it looked like regime change was in bloom? There must be some special travel agency offering special packages at special rates for special expatriate patriots.

Din! Din! Din!

I just finished "The Snow Leopard," the Zen adventure classic by Peter Matthiessen. I saw the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" only recently. Inevitably, depictions of life outside North America and Europe remind me of Cairo. "The Snow Leopard," particulary its closing homage to the author's favorite porter, brings to mind my friend Sheroni, whose full name was Mohammed Ibrahim Hussein Sheroni, a black African. Egypt is very multi-racial, Africans, Arabs, a small minority who likely can trace their ancestry to Alexander the Great. Sheroni always dressed in starched and bleached, white galabeya robes, dashing against his blackness, and a white cap with no brim. He worked as a domestic in the households of foreigners, the British before the Americans. His English was excellent, and he had a great sense of humor, as we discussed Egypt, Americans, his pilgrimage to Mecca (the pigeons do not shit in the courtyard of the mosque, he informed me with reverence in his voice and a twinkle in his eye). He was an almost daily visitor in my home, an apartment compound, shared by several American Embassy families.

One day Sheroni knocked on my door in great distress. He had been accused of stealing a bicycle from the compound. He wanted me to go with him to the police station. When I got there, an open-court investigation had already been convened by a young officer with a college education and caution of Americans. Sheroni's accuser was the caretaker of the apartment compound, well-known to me as Brahim. Many caretakers, domestics, and neighborhood street people suplemented their incomes through odd-jobs and some not so odd for the police and other government security agencies. I explained to the polite police officer that Mr. Sheroni was a good man, and Mr. Brahim was a good man, but there had been a misunderstanding. Mr. Sheroni visited me regularly and was always welcome. Simply sighting him on the premises at the time something went missing did not make him a thief. In the end, everyone smiled, bowed many times, and went home free. I have no idea if Sheroni had stolen the bicycle or not. Thievery was fairly common in Egypt and not always easy to define or assign guilt.

When I was scheduled to leave Cairo (my wife and children had already taken the first airline departure the day after school let out), Sheroni invited me to his home for a farewell dinner, the only invitation into an Egyptian home I ever received or frankly heard of any American receiving outside of Embassy officialdom. Sheroni did not live in a luxurious part of town, but he had built his house with his own hands from Nile mud and bricks, and it had three levels, including the usual flat rooftop open to the sun and stars. Sheroni, who was a cook by trade, had prepared a chicken himself, although it and the accompaniments were served by his wife Bedoea, famous for her homemade bread (like Pita), with which Sheroni had kept us supplied throughout our stay in Cairo. Sheroni and I ate sitting on the floor. His eldest son, age 12, was allowed to join us, but Sheroni's wife and the rest of his many children watched us eat and served us, presumably taking their meal from what was left of the bountiful feast. After the meal, my stomach was upset, but no worse than I had become accustomed to in that land of "Pharoah's Revenge." My last morning, the embassy driver picked me up at 4 a.m. to ride to the airport. Sheroni stood by the front gate to say goodbye. We hugged and cried. I emptied my pockets of all my remaining Egyptian money and gave it to Sheroni. He refused it again and again, but in the end accepted it. I don't know. There may have been some American money in there also. It was a long time ago. I hope there was, anyway.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter