A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [23]
After a short spin on a highway, the taxi crept slowly through narrow streets with throngs of people and livestock everywhere. To say it’s hot in Cairo in the summer is an understatement, so the residents come out in the cooler evenings and stay well into the night. The cafés overflowed. The shops were open, and patrons were haggling over goods. I could smell the sweat through the open taxi windows. Every once in a while, a biker carrying sheep hides, the heads still attached, knocked into the side of the cab. Each time I jumped.
Eventually we pulled up in front of the Ambassador Hotel, a grimy, stucco, seven- or eight-story building. I paid the fare, swung my backpack over my shoulder, and walked in. Men in white gallabiyas, traditional full-length cotton shirts, and white head wraps lounged in the unadorned and uncarpeted lobby, sipping tea and chatting. Two fans tried vainly to stir the thick air through the crowded quarters. In my jeans, T-shirt, backpack, and brown skin, I looked at once familiar and unfamiliar. The conversation stopped conspicuously when I walked in. I was just too tired and too on edge to engage. In phrase-book Arabic, I asked for a room, was given an ancient skeleton key from the front desk, and stepped into an obviously unsafe elevator with an attendant. I could hear the conversation in the lobby resume loudly as soon as the door closed. I checked into a filthy room with a single stained mattress on a metal frame, a concrete floor, a window that opened onto the elevator shaft, and a cold-water tap. The bathroom, down the hall, consisted of a hole in the floor over which one stood or squatted and from which the foulest stench rose without relief. None of it mattered. I was asleep in minutes.
I explored the city for a few days. The year 1978 was a good time to be an American in the Middle East. While I was in Cairo, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, came home from signing the popular Camp David Accords in Washington, D.C., and the United States was seen as an honest broker in the long struggle to bring peace to the region. When the Egyptians I met figured out I was American, they were especially gracious.
I got around mainly on foot, wandering for hours through little lanes and city squares. From the main square in the center of Cairo, I squeezed onto a dilapidated public bus. Crowded doesn’t begin to describe it. People sat on top of each other inside or hung from the windows or doors outside. The bus never really stopped so much as slowed down so that passengers could jump on or off. You paid the fare by passing money from hand to hand to the conductor, the way Americans pay for hot dogs and beer at baseball games. I rode out to Giza and, rounding the last bend in the road, watched the pyramids and the Sphinx rise out of the desert and thrust themselves into the bluest sky. I visited the Cairo Museum, which had more priceless treasure than there was space to properly display and preserve it. I learned to negotiate for everything.
Temperatures were well over 100 degrees during the day, and my clothes seemed to be melting. So did my skin. I still bear scars from the blisters that appeared on my arms just below my T-shirt sleeves. I had been warned about drinking the water, so I had iodine pills to kill the bacteria in my water bottle. They also made the water taste foul, which deterred me from drinking as much as I should have. I was so lightheaded and parched after one day of wandering around the city that I literally stumbled into the lobby of a hotel and collapsed into a booth in the dark, cool bar, disoriented and barely able to speak. I hated beer, but I asked for one anyway. They brought a tall brown bottle without a label that the waiter called Bira Jamil, camel’s beer. It was icy cold. And divine.
Because I couldn’t speak the language and knew no one, conversation was rare,