Men crowded around the tables and made their purchases in units called ‘ersh,’ equal to about four grams. Cigarettes were used to counterbalance the scale. Orders were placed and small chunks removed from the mother-hunk with startling precision either by tooth or knife. The going price was about a half-dollar per gram. A more elite public shopped from the relative discretion of a house just behind the square in a cul-de-sac. It had three grilled street-level windows in the façade, each one corresponding to a different grade of hashish. People lined up according to their preference for Lebanese fresh or Lebanese aged and compressed, or, for the economy-minded, Lebanese moldy, something that had suffered somewhat in the transport.
A man named Mohamed Marzouk, a fearless dealer whose exploits were the stuff of popular odes, operated this little convenience shop. At a time when the TVs and radios were spouting propagandist drivel praising Sadat in saccharine song, parodies were derived from the melodies in honor of this chubby smuggler. The fruit of his efforts was the source of what little enjoyment there was to be had by a large market segment. Mohamed Marzouk was loved and his life and freedom held sacred.
I was allowed past a long series of watchers and guards into the house. It was empty except for a few chairs and a table where the great man sat counting a thick wad of bank notes with hypnotizing dexterity. When he finished he looked up and greeted me, slapping my hand. He was somewhere between fifty and sixty years old, balding and stout, dressed Western style with a large turquoise ring set in gold. He asked me if I had completed my military service yet. This was his little joke, referring to the fact that I dressed like a boy. I had my camera and wanted very much to photograph Marzouk.
‘Still working for the Israelis?’ he asked amiably.
‘Only on Saturdays,’ I told him and he chuckled. We’d met in a nearby café operated by one of his lackeys and he’d remarked my ability to imbibe an astounding number of gozas in a single sitting. This talent attracted attention and rumors circulated to explain my frequent presence in the district. I was an Israeli or Egyptian spy. I was a whore, a lesbian, a transvestite or mad. Marzouk, an excellent student of human nature, knew that I wasn’t and rewarded me with lumps of provender.
‘Look, I’d like to take your picture sometime, OK?’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re beautiful,’ I extemporized. He guffawed and slapped his thigh and called out to one of his lackeys to bring him something. His man came running and thrust a fist-sized chunk of hashish into Marzouk’s hand. He admired it for a moment, turning it around and around, then bit into it like an apple and gave me a piece glistening with saliva and bearing the imprimatur of his incisors. I thanked him profusely and headed back toward the square where I saw my good friend Samy who was doing some shopping.
Latter-day dragoman, linguist and procurer, Samy was an Egyptian youth who helped me to navigate the labyrinth of Cairo. He was a trifle bug-eyed but had exemplary teeth that he habitually covered with his hand when he spoke as if to reveal their perfection would be unseemly. His father had recently died, having spent the last years of his life immersed in the Koran and making the annual pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. In response to his death Samy started to lose hair and take tranquilizers. He was just eighteen. Flattered by my interest in his neighborhood, he led me deeper and deeper into the less accessible areas. We paused at regular intervals to visit the numerous cafés serving coffee, tea and more potent refreshment, hashish, ‘fresh from the trees’ as Samy said.
Samy contributed to the local economy by lightly fleecing bewildered tourists who ventured into the souk where he was born and raised. Hands in his pockets with his slouching, easy gait he made his approach: ‘Hello my friend, how can I help you on this beautiful day?’ He had a spiel in seven languages including Japanese and Russian. He singled out straggling, sweating victims from the mainstream of pedestrians with the precision of an Arab archer picking off sun-struck Crusaders.
He took them to a quiet courtyard that was once a silk caravansary, set them down to cool and served them mint tea. Then he produced the articles they had seen along the way that had interested them; brass trays, cotton scarves and papery leather poufs. Samy made a show of negotiating with the tourists, implying that they were tough bargainers. When he felt they were gratified, rested and thoroughly broke, he gathered them up and returned them to their group or their bus like the most conscientious of sheep dogs. Then he pocketed a commission from the happy tourists and his friends, the local merchants, sometimes in the form of fragrant morsels of hash, this being one of the quarter’s many negotiable currencies.
Samy and I took a liking to each other. We profited from our friendship by asking questions regarding our cultures. Like most Egyptians his age Samy visualized America as a combination of Disney Land, Times Square and cattle ranch peopled by eccentric Texas billionaires, hard-nosed detectives, gorgeous blondes and pistol-packing troublemakers, all of whom drove big cars and ate steaks on a regular basis. This, to him, was clear. Other aspects of daily life were less understandable. One evening as we made our way along the tangled paths to Batneyya, Samy broached a difficult subject.
‘So, when they die in America,’ he hazarded, hands stuffed in his pockets, ‘do the women go screaming through the streets, like they do here?’
‘Not exactly.’ I was busy trying not to stumble while dealing with the narrow pitted streets and the hillocks of mud and sand displaced by daily hosings and endless human and animal traffic.
‘And what about when they go into the hole?’ Samy persisted, smoothly veering to the right to allow a man riding a bicycle balancing an immense rattan tray holding fifty kilos of flat bread on his head to pass.
‘Well, they put them in a box, then they put them in a hole,’ I replied, distracted by the appearance of a young girl skipping rope without the rope.
‘With the box and everything?’ Appalled, Samy turned to me in a rare moment when we were able to walk abreast. I did a neat hip-tuck and barely missed collision with a man exiting a doorway carrying an enormous ball of twine.
‘Of course,’ I answered, a trifle strident. ‘What do you think, they just throw him naked into some hole, for God’s sake?’ Samy shook his head in distress at my tone, because that is exactly what his people do, except with a shroud, usually.
‘No,’ I continued self-righteously, ‘they put him in a proper box first,
then
they stick him in the hole.’ Samy didn’t quite get it but we’d arrived at the café belonging to ‘Oota’ (the cat). We greeted the occupants of this vine-covered sidewalk establishment and took our places on wooden chairs whose seats were decorated with the graceful, albeit incessantly humiliated, profile of Cleopatra.
A twelve-year-old pipe boy placed a tall tin table between us and shuffled off. He returned with a tray of ten crude clay pipe bowls filled with rough-cut, molasses-soaked tobacco. Samy took a piece of hashish from its hiding place behind his ear and started biting off bits that he flattened into dime-sized disks with his gleaming teeth, placing a piece atop each of the pipe bowls.
The pipe boy returned with the pipe, or ‘goza,’ in one hand, and a small tea strainer full of glowing coals in the other. The goza is made from a big jar filled with water and closed with a rubber plug from which protrude two cane sticks; a short one where the clay pipe bowl fits, and another about as long as a man’s arm, from which one smokes. The boy made the tiny coals glow moving the strainer in small arcs with deft twists of his wrist. It’s a trick of the trade, relying on centrifugal force that makes mesmerizing ruby-red trails of light.
The pipe boy planted a pipe bowl on the short stick, spooned a few coals on top of the hashish with a worn and bent tin spoon and proffered the business end of the contraption to me. Several firm but not complete draws to get the thing going, then one long pull, straight to the bottom of the lungs, followed by a slow controlled exhalation, preferably uninterrupted by an explosive cough.
This isn’t easy since the contents of the smoke include about five grams of tobacco aside from the hash. Plus, one has to make the pipe burn sufficiently because to only partially consume the hashish would be disgraceful. But I had the knack. The pipe boy winked with approval, emptied the pipe and replaced it with another for Samy. I remarked on his uncanny ability to send the smoke in two perfectly bisected jets from his nose, one flowing east, one west. Samy sensed my awe, and seized the moment to pursue our earlier conversation.
‘So, is it true that in your country they put the people in the box, and then into the hole with the box and everything?’ Like most Egyptians he pronounced all words that begin with a ‘P’ as if they began with a ‘B’ because ‘P’ does not exist in the Arabic alphabet. Hence ‘but the beoble in the box.’ I nodded, now engaged in the slightly easier task of attacking bipe number two.
‘But what if they haven’t got a box?’ Samy asked reasonably, coughing a little with his mouth closed, smoke dribbling in white ribbons from his nose before exhaling the mother load.
‘They buy one. I mean, maybe they can’t afford a nice one so they just get a cheap one,’ I answered democratically before confronting my third pipe.
Samy smiled brightly. ‘Ahh, berhaps then your American government is giving sbecial boxes for the boor beoble?’ He lovingly handled the long stick that he applied daintily to his mouth, taking the spoon from the boy to tamp down the coals more firmly.
‘No, Samy, it’s not like that. If you don’t have the money for a box, you go and chop down a tree or something, but no box, no hole.’
Samy’s eyes were slightly glazed as he labored to comprehension. I disposed of the fourth pipe and explained in greater detail.
‘It’s like this. In America and even in Europe they’ve got this habit of putting the people in boxes. People make a living out of making the boxes. Some of them are really nice, lined with silk cushions. Other are less comfortable and just plain. Some are even made of brass and cost lots of money, just like the pharaohs, you see?’
Samy nodded thoughtfully and polished off another pipe. I approached my final one with a sense of achievement. Samy, too, did justice to his fifth, imagining a place where everyone has his own box, even in death. The idea of such luxury was strange to him, belonging to a world where everything is shared, even the communal bier that serves as final transport to an often common grave, and where burial (within twenty-four hours of death according to Koranic injunction) is one of the few expedients in an existence otherwise bereft of the concept of haste. ‘Are you sure that they go in with the box and that the box stays there, too, for all the time?’ he asked.
‘Sure I’m sure.’
The café animated with men come to take their nocturnal ease, playing backgammon and drinking glasses of sugary, dark, steaming tea. One of them was dressed in an immaculate white
galabeyya
, ‘King’ Hussein, a Clark Gable lookalike and recent guest of one of Cairo’s prison dungeons, a confirmed ‘hashesh’ or hash smoker. King was one of the usual suspects, a small-time hash retailer that took the rap for larger dealers during purges of the quarter. These raids were choreographed to portray Sadat as a stern disciplinarian to gratify international funding agencies and the non-smoking segment of the population. What they actually ended up doing was making local heroes out of the fall guys. Everyone knew the Sadat himself was a hashesh. We shared a round of pipes with King and Samy suggested walking to the City of the Dead to continue smoking.
Known in Arabic as the ‘Toorab,’ which means ‘cemetery’ as well as ‘dust,’ the City of the Dead is adjacent to the Old City, an immense desert sprawl peppered with the unmarked tombs of the populace and a community of small villa-like mausoleums that characterized the golden ages of Islam. Boulevards great and small are laid out in a sober grid with an orderliness that the living city never achieved. They are lined with walled frontage interrupted by intricate wrought-iron gates, or domed constructions. There were few cars here and considering the space, fewer people. Yet the City of the Dead was alive with people come to take residence in the tombs of their, or someone else’s, forbears. Ancestors make excellent landlords.
According to Islamic custom, Fridays are set aside for visiting the cemetery and in the old days this meant a bit of a journey so the visitors would sometimes spend the night. The tombs were designed to accommodate both the living and the dead according to their divergent needs. Those of the well-to-do vary in size, materials and decor, from the modest to the marvelous. Many had courtyards, sometimes equipped with a source of water. The buildings house the remains of the deceased, moldering somewhere safely underground with perhaps a stone or marble throne-like sculpture to mark the grave. The Egyptians say, ‘better misery than the cemetery.’ The people living in the City of the Dead enjoyed a rare taste of both.
Adequate housing in Cairo is a thing of the past and the City of the Dead offered an attractive alternative to, some say, millions of the otherwise homeless. For Infinite Lease: quiet, spacious, luminous semi-detached and detached family tombs. Over the years the people of the Toorab organized pirating electricity and telecommunications lines from the city. They opened shops to fix radios and TVs, make mattresses and sell groceries. Laundry fluttered on clothes lines strung between tombstones. Children came home from school to the tombs and played soccer in the wide boulevards beside the decorated domes capping the crypts of forgotten Mamluk nobility. We arrived at a smoking establishment belonging to someone named Ali; a courtyard where ducks and chickens pattered about a small mud puddle beside a beautifully carved alabaster tomb marker. Our host wasted no time in calling one of his girls to serve us.
About fifteen pipes later, having admired Orion’s Belt in a silence interrupted only by the chugging of the water pipe for an hour or three, we began our journey back to the living and along the way a taxi sidled up lazily beside us. Samy knew the driver and exchanged pleasantries with him and his passenger. The driver offered us a ride and I was inclined to refuse noting the care-worn condition of the car but Samy insisted they were friends and getting a taxi leaving the City of the Dead could be problematic.