[image courtesy TIMEA]
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Cairo (again) Three Days Ago
“Allo?” the pleasantly accented voice of a woman brings me back to the streets of Cairo where I still sit on the sidewalk daydreaming. They were right – my mother, the Mossad agents, all of them – I didn’t have the kind of money to be taking this trip let alone to be getting a room at the Nile Hilton. “Are you lost?” My initial instinct is to try to dismiss this question, but when I look up I’m staring into the face of a beautiful, young French woman. Her small pack and camera tell me she is a tourist as well.
“I can’t seem to find a hotel,” I answer pathetically.
“There is a good hotel down the street where I am staying.” I love the way she pronounces “hotel” without the “h”. “It is just two blocks this way and on the left.” She points in the direction the last guy tried to lead me. She is staying there – I am sold. I would sleep in a camel stable, or whatever it is they call where camels sleep, if she was.
I shoulder my pack for the final time that day trying not to grunt, and thank her profusely for her kindness. Following her rather un-detailed directions I quickly find myself in front of none other than the Tulip Hotel.
The only actual evidence of the hotel is a small brass plaque beside the door that indicates that it’s on the third floor. A few moments after ringing the buzzer, I hear the click and buzz of the electric lock and push open the tall metal door, nearly tripping on the ridiculously high sill. The building is old, and a layer of charm lies just under the layer of dust. Whether it is pre-turn of the century construction is hard for me to say, but it is certainly pre-elevator. I’m ashamed to admit that I actually had to stop and rest half way up. When I reach the top (four flights, since like in Europe the “first” floor is one floor above the ground) I’m sweating noticeably, not that I haven’t been sweating pretty much all day or all week. These, though, are fresh rivulets of perspiration that cut through the airbrushing of dust on my face, dripping off of my nose and onto the tile landing. I stand there a few minutes in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to get myself to stop sweating before knocking on the door. Another buzz and click and I am inside an office/lobby that looks a great deal like my grandmother’s living room – or would if she had left it to a bunch of Egyptian men to smoke and watch TV in for twenty years. Directly across the room from me, an elderly man hunches over a small desk. He has short, silver hair that matches his moustache and those truly cool giant, rectangular shaped glasses with thick, tapering, black, plastic rims that only old guys can really pull off. His skin isn’t exactly tan, but it isn’t fair either, it looks sort of smoked. His shaving has left some gray stubble unconnected to his moustache near the creased corners of his mouth. It brings to mind the image of a straight razor in shaky hands.
Under the desk, I can see a pair of light tan loafers with small gold buckles at the sides. Dark socks lead up to crisp cuffs on his knit slacks of a brown and cream colored hound’s tooth. The belt matches the shoes and the shirt matches them both. It’s a light cotton that looks like it was designed for diplomatic missions to the tropics, or maybe golf. Overall, the guy looks absolutely sweet. I don’t know what he thinks of my look, but he nods and smiles as I close the heavy wood door behind me.
In greeting, I say something intended to sound like, “Salaam Aleyikum.” The old man smiles and says something I can’t understand in return. “Do you have any rooms available?”
“How many?”
“Just one.”
“How many nights staying?”
“Three probably, maybe more.”
“I am sorry, but we are full at the moment.” My disappointment must be obvious, because he seems to consider me for a long, quiet moment. There must be a hundred hotels within the tangled square mile of where I stand, and at that moment I am confident I could find none of them. Finally, he exhales a long, blue plume of cigarette smoke straight out into the space between us. “You can pay for a double room?”
“How much?” I ask, knowing full well it doesn’t matter.
“Twenty-five pounds.” I haven’t quite gotten to figuring out the exchange rate, but it sounds reasonable to me.
“O.K.”
“Please, wait one moment. We may have one.” He motions to the other end of the room where two couches and an armchair, all upholstered in a bristly green fabric with a pattern of recessed flowers, are arranged in front of an old console style television. He yells something in the soft way Egyptians have of yelling, into an adjoining room. A male voice answers, and a long discussion ensues with a woman eventually joining the debate.
I take a seat on one of the couches between two young Egyptian men. The opposite couch is taken up by an older couple who also appear to be Egyptian, while a young, pale European looking woman sits in the armchair with a sunburned friend sitting on the floor near her feet. No one speaks as I sit down, all of them remaining focused on the television. I can’t tell what is being said, but the images are of people placing flowers against a fence and crying. There is also a shot of a British guard with a tall black, furry hat standing stoically among the bouquets, then another of what looks sort of like a highway underpass, and the Eifel Tower.
The sunburned woman turns to me, her eyes nearly as red as the back of her neck, “absolutely awful isn’t it?” She’s British.
I look at her for a second, utterly confused, and finally answer, “yeah, it is.” We both turn back to the TV. A couple more minutes of watching similar footage, including a scene from Washington, D.C., and all the sobbing people on TV and in the room are starting to worry me. I ask the sunburned woman, “Sorry, what exactly happened?”
“Princess Diana, she was killed in a car accident in Paris.”
“Oh.” I say it as gravely as I can, given my relief.
“Both she and Dodi Fayed.” Apparently anticipating my next question, she continues, “Dodi Fayed was her boyfriend, and the son of a wealthy Egyptian businessman. You know Harrod’s?” I nod, not really sure if I do know Harrod’s. “He owns it.”
“Oh.”
Our conversation, and the mention of Dodi Fayed seem to spark a spate of nodding and quiet conversation among the Egyptians watching. The sunburned British woman tells me, as do several Egyptians I later meet in Cairo, that it is suspected that the British government or the royal family was somehow behind the accident, as they didn’t want the mother of the future king to marry an Egyptian.
Just then, the hotel keeper calls over to me from the desk, “O.K. we have a room for you.” Thank God. “You wait maybe twenty minutes and we will have it ready.” I spend the next half hour participating, through television, in the global outpouring of grief over Diana’s death.
To be honest, I’m not all that broken up. I’m sure Princess Diana was a perfectly wonderful person, and yes, I assure the sun-burned woman, I do feel badly for William and Harry (they are still princes, though), but no, I don’t really wonder what is going through Prince Charles’ mind, and I don’t really hope he feels terrible, nor do I have a very developed opinion on the problem of the paparazzi chasing celebrities until they crash their cars, but yes, I suppose maybe it is a little bit like when Kennedy was shot – I guess I will remember exactly where I was. Maybe not so much because I care, but just because I was in Egypt.
My room ready, I have an excuse to remove myself from the tragic events and climb two more painful flights of stairs with a key attached to a ridiculously large piece of wood that shifts my worry from losing it to stubbing my toe on it in the middle of the night.
The room isn’t bad at all. It ties in nicely with the theme of the office downstairs: a foundation of twenties or thirties class with updates of seventies charm thrown in. My grandmother would be quite comfortable. The floor tiles are large squares of alternating black and green that give a strange but not unappealing look, like an old TV set that’s had its color knob fiddled with. I imagine British officers – not very important ones – encamped here during the war. I don’t actually know if British officers stayed in Cairo during the war, but they must have at some point, right?
Dropping my pack on the double bed, it produces a thud but no bounce, and I make a mental note that the bed is very firm. I follow the tiles into the bathroom where the full charms of the Tulip are quickly revealed. It is a bit dingy with age, but by no means disgusting by the standards I have recently become accustomed to. A large metal showerhead the size of a sunflower drops straight down out of the ceiling, and a plastic shower curtain hangs from a thick metal pipe sectioning off roughly one third of the room. Unfortunately there is no discernable divide between the shower area and the rest of the bathroom floor, and the only drain is in the middle of the room on the supposedly dry side of the curtain. I ran into a similar design a few weeks ago at a hostel in Sweden, and I wasn’t impressed. It turned the entire bathroom floor into a swampy mess.
The feature that really catches my eye, though, is the toilet. It isn’t the toilet itself, but the thin copper tube snaking up the outside of the back of the bowl, over the rim and down into the bowl where it bends back up, ending sticking up several inches above the water line. A small twist valve on the outside of the toilet controls water flow through the tube. The system is definitely not factory, and looks kind of dangerous. Naturally, I turn the valve. A stream of water shoots up out of the toilet and thankfully past my head splattering on the opposite wall. At first I’m stunned and can’t do anything but watch the water flow down the wall. Then I can’t get the valve closed. By the time I finally get it shut it off, the floor is a swampy mess. The need for toilet paper being apparently nullified by this homemade bidet contraption, there isn’t any to mop the floor with. I swear to never touch the valve again.
Tiptoeing back into the bedroom so as not to spread the water that shot out of the toilet onto the floor, I momentarily forget my mental note about the hardness of the bed and allow myself to fall backwards onto it. I hit with a clunk that nearly knocks the wind out of me, and close my eyes for the first time in what seems like a very long time.
Several restful seconds later, they are open again, scanning the peeling paint on ceiling. I can hear the din of the street seeping in through the just open window. The sound seems to push on the gauzy drapes making them swing slightly on the brass curtain rod. It’s 9:30 pm, and I’m exhausted, but I have never been in Cairo on a Tuesday night before – I’ve never been in Cairo on any night. There is simply no question of my going out to have a look.
I reach my arm deep into my pack for a clean shirt (I can differentiate them by feel now), and head back down to the office to drop off my key and ridiculously large key chain.