Mary Russel - Dreamers of the Day

Stammering an apology, I closed my pocketbook. The porter looked relieved. With an attitude of intense dignity, he whistled down a donkey-cart driver. This “dragoman” was to be engaged to convey me and my luggage the final few miles to the Semiramis Hotel at a price that the porter would determine.

Establishing the fee involved much vituperative negotiation. The dragoman glared at Rosie. She returned the favor. I might have been alerted to the impending difficulties by their mutual hostility, but that was when the porter said severely, “Six piastres, madams! Not more for him!” The porter himself then stood still, which seemed to indicate that his services to me were complete. Tentatively I reached into my pocketbook, and this time my offering was accepted with a charming, toothy smile.

I was assisted into the cart. The dragoman slapped the reins. His donkey lurched forward in its traces.

And then: Cairo. Goodness gracious! How to describe that city? The smell! The racket! Even without a mob chanting incomprehensible slogans, the normal everyday noise of the place was an almost physical assault. There were no traffic lights and no policemen to direct the cars through intersections. Lane lines, where they existed, were ignored. The streets were jammed with pedestrians and vehicles of all descriptions. All this seemed to shock and exasperate the dragoman, who flicked his whip at everyone who came within range and screamed for them to give way.

Shrouded women pressed themselves against alley walls as we passed. They balanced a variety of burdens on their heads, and most carried small children in their arms. These ladies nearly all wore veils or held over their noses a portion of the long black garments that trailed them through the trash-strewn byways. Lillie had written that such concealment was a sign of modesty, but now that I was in Cairo, I wondered if the practice had originated as a defense against the city’s odor, which was a perfectly nauseating blend of sewage and citrus, burning tobacco and roasting meat, unwashed bodies and jasmine.

In contrast to the mute and shrouded hordes of Cairo’s women, the city’s men yelled constantly. Regardless of topic, every exchange seemed to be composed entirely of bitter recrimination. Men bargained loudly in tiny shops and stalls, where every item offered in trade provoked rancor, disgust, and a mutual loathing in buyer and seller. Others played games—checkers or chess or cards—at the outdoor tables of street cafés, and each was vocally convinced that his opponent was the worst kind of cheating lowlife. At one point, I braced myself to witness bloodshed as two chess players shrieked and gesticulated in the most menacing way. Then, to my astonishment, they stood up, mounted the same little donkey, and rode away together.

Each time our cart rounded some corner, my presence drew rapt attention. Groups of arguing men paused and stared over the rims of tiny china cups, or sucked on long tubes attached to smoke-filled glass jars containing water that bubbled with each breath. I felt like a film star with my cloche hat and dark glasses, dressed perfectly for the late-afternoon warmth in a linen dress that stopped at my knees. I fancied that the Egyptian women envied me. Poor things, I thought, sweltering in their robes and veils!

My dragoman pulled onto a lovely boulevard, and the noise receded as his donkey tugged us along its palm-fringed pavement. “The Nile, madams,” the dragoman called out, pointing with his whip. “The Semiramis,” he said a few minutes later.

Sitting on the cart, I caught a glimpse of the hotel’s interior, which made a general impression of polished brass and marble across which teams of energetic bellmen carried hatboxes, toiletry cases, and wardrobe trunks. The Semiramis promised to be every bit as grand as I had anticipated, but the Nile itself? Well, I must admit that the Nile was a disappointment. Given my present situation, the irony is considerable, now that I think of it.

I suppose I expected too much of a river that has been called “liquid history.” Mr. Joseph Conrad wrote that the Nile was an immense uncoiled snake with its head in the sea, its body at rest, curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost to sight. Mr. Conrad was, of course, a literary genius, whereas I was merely a schoolteacher. Imagine a hundred-foot rope, I would have told my students. Tie a knot in it ten feet from the end. That knot is Cairo. Now, to represent the Nile’s delta, separate the strands that make up the ten-foot end to form a triangle. The Nile’s length is marvelous, but when seen crossways from the boulevard, its width was unimpressive. And its depth? Well, in March, when I was there? Its depth was just plain silly.

Why, the Cuyahoga River is more to look at! I was thinking when a fresh round of shouting broke out nearby.

I have read that most travelers quickly come to feel a sort of detached immunity in truly foreign places, and I certainly experienced that myself. In the time it took to go from train station to hotel, I had come to the conclusion that Cairo’s unrelenting uproar was a phenomenon that could not possibly involve me. Then Rosie began to snarl, and I slowly realized our own arrival was the cause of the latest dispute. The combatants were a native doorman and my dragoman. Their field of battle was the stairway into the hotel. Fingers jabbed in my direction. Glares were aimed down substantial noses toward my luggage, my dog, and myself.

“I have a reservation,” I said in the voice I used to bring classrooms of unruly immigrant children to order. “I made all the arrangements through Thomas Cook’s in Cleveland, Ohio.”

Struck dumb, both men paused to stare at me.

“That’s in America,” I explained in the sudden silence.

For a moment they were joined in astonishment, as though they had just seen some revolting insect stand on two of its six legs and speak. An instant later, the dispute resumed; if anything, the attempt of a woman to take part in her own affairs provoked both men to further fury. The doorman, eyes and blood vessels bulging, blocked the dragoman’s effort to carry my bags into the hotel. The dragoman matched him in every particular, trying to gain entry by dint of volume and main force. Rosie’s high-pitched yapping adding to the bedlam.

Even in Cairo, this was sufficient to draw attention. Thin brown children appeared as if from nowhere, their delight in the entertainment multiplied by the element of comedy contributed by a dachshund’s miniature ferocity. Several Egyptian policemen converged on the scene and joined in the shouting. Inside the hotel, a large group of European gentlemen halted halfway down a curving staircase that descended into the lobby. There were dozens of them, some in khaki uniforms, others in well-cut suits. All of them were looking at me. In their midst, like a queen surrounded by courtiers, stood a majestically tall woman in her fifties. More commanding than any of the soldiers around her, she took in the scene and frowned.

At that point, I still believed that if I could just step inside and tell the desk clerk about my reservation, everything could be resolved in a civilized tone of voice. Explaining this to the accumulated variety of Egyptian gentlemen, I tried to move toward the lobby, but Rosie was engaged in a series of feints at the end of her leash. Though she had clearly identified the doorman as the source of our trouble, she took several distracted opportunities to snap at the excited children who danced away from her. I bent over to pick her up. Shrieks of childish laughter, and a shout of shared horror from the men informed me that the movement had exposed my legs upward of their midpoint. Mortified, I straightened, with Rosie squirming in my arms.

The whole thing was starting to look like an audition for a comic vaudeville revue when the queenly woman broke away from the Europeans on the staircase and strode across the lobby toward me, with a very slight and very cool smile. She had a strong oval face surrounded by a mass of graying red hair folded into a pompadour beneath a densely flowered picture hat. Despite the weather and the decade, she was swathed in layers of Edwardian striped silk overlaid with lashings of Belgian lace. From the silver fox boa slung over her shoulder to the black high-topped shoes with their fine pearl buttons, the ensemble was tasteful and expensive.