Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

I soon discovered that there are two almost completely different versions of the range and effect of this surgery, and that while I should have full opportunity to hear one, I should have to gather the other, and most important, one chiefly by sharpening my own eyes and ears and the shiver of receptivity on my skin. As a white visitor without any Arabic, I naturally found myself socially stranded among the remnants of the European ‘foreign’ community; I could not expect to cross the very few old and personal bridges between European society and Egyptian society that have survived, successfully, the Palestine War, the Officers’ Revolution and Suez, and I could not expect, without a word of their language, to reach a confession of the hopes, fears and prides of the people of the streets. While I was in Cairo I did not let myself forget that the voice in my ear — a measured, intelligent and mostly unembittered voice — was not the voice of the people; that coarse and muffled note I should have to pick up for myself.

Cairo as seen by the few members of the old community who still manage to live there is a depressing place; an intimate whose sight is going and from whose mind the mobility of memory is fading. This is not entirely blimpish nostalgia for good old days. The ancient city that only a few years ago was one of the elegant centres of the modern world has forgotten its sophistication. Lack of foreign currency has emptied the Kasr-el-Nil shops of nearly everything imported; they are filled with decent cloth of uninspired design made in Egyptian textile mills, and unbeautiful shoes fairly well made by Egyptian factories. Even Groppi’s famous delicatessen exposition has shrunk; there are one or two delicacies you cannot buy there, now. In those smart restaurants which are still open, the head chef has gone (banished to that ‘home’ in France from which he came perhaps two generations ago?) and the second-in-command is following the recipes, but not the flair. The great artists and musicians of the world no longer come to Egypt, and there are few who come to hear them if they do. The only evidence I saw of the cultural life of the year in Cairo was the peeling remains of tremendous posters advertising a Soviet ballet and theatre company (a third-rate one, I was told) that had come and gone. The luxe of Europe has been banished, but what is left, of course, is the pandemic inanity of Hollywood. The entertainment life of Cairo has become that of a complex of villages, each with its ten-foot-high paper face of Marilyn Monroe.

In the eloquent silence of a departed presence that Europe has left behind in Cairo — a silence that you are aware of beneath the unchanged racket and tinkle of the street — a sound forms. The hoarse scraping of the palms of deserted gardens in Maadi is the nervous clearing of the throat; the faint stir of air in the peacock’s tail of fallen leaves before the door of the British Embassy is the taking of a preparatory breath — and there, it is out. ‘Sequestrated’. Sibilant and fateful, this is the last word on the destiny of nearly every European you meet and every second shop or bank you pass. It is the excuse, the explanation and the apotheosis of city life.

With the immediate past of the city under sequestration, the present seems to be passing into the hands of the army officers and their wives. They are the new elite; the officers’ wives are the women who spend hours and money at the beauty parlours, now, and (it is said with a touch of malice) picnic on the Gezirah Club golf course because they haven’t yet got so far as learning the game itself. There is a splendid new officers’ club, too, where the officers take the ease of top men. No doubt these are the people for whom the new suburb, dubbed Mokattam City, is intended. The development has the authentic, sad, nouveau riche stamp; bold, cocky, unsure in taste but sure of right — in this case the right to plan ugly villas on the moon-landscape of the Mokattam hills. This certainly is one of the most beautiful places in the world to live, if you feel you could stand the unearthliness of it. Withdrawn from the softening presence of the Nile, these austere heights have no geological memory of green or root or growth; as some mountains are above the tree belt, so these are, so to speak, above the life belt. They drop sheerly from level to level, the higher ones carved into deep escarpments of rock and sand, and the lower ones pitted and cragged by the quarrying that has built Cairo for years. From the foot you see a landslide of hardened Demerara sugar, sliced here, scooped out there, gouged and layered. From the top, with the strange, coarse crumbs of a substance that does not seem to be the surface of the earth underfoot, you look, far below, on the peace of the Dead City, a place from which at this height only the soundtrack seems missing; and beyond it to the whole marvellous city, from the medieval minarets and domes to the cubist shapes of light and shade made by modern blocks; and, at last, to the desert itself. I went into a Fatimid tomb that has stood alone, up there, through the centuries; and I had lunch at the new casino, a vast grand piano of a building whose ‘free lines’ have begun to peel before it is quite completed.

On another day I drove past deserted Mena House — open, I believe, but listless — and went to eat tahina and kebab at another new restaurant, this time at the foot, or rather under the nose, of the Sphinx. This one is called ‘Sahara City’ and it is run by a Sudanese who looks like Uncle Tom and as a small boy was a page at the court of Franz Joseph of Austria. Both the casino restaurant and ‘Sahara City’ were empty; ‘Nobody goes anywhere,’ said my friends. But that night, at a restaurant I had remembered from my last visit, the tables were full and people stood ten deep around the bar — avaricious-looking women, men who watched everyone who came in.

‘Then who are these?’ I asked.

‘The local representatives of international crooks,’ said my companion boredly.

The cosmopolitan city of Cairo is dead as the Dead City itself. But does it matter? Does it really count? When I sat in the train, waiting to leave for Upper Egypt, I had a sense of release from involvement with a prevalent emotional atmosphere that had little or nothing to do with me; my emphatic identification with the dispossessed foreign community left me, and I very properly took up my own role again, which was that of a stranger in a strange land. The train took a long time to get started; a boy with rings of sesame-studded bread braceleting his arms from armpit to wrist ran up and down the platform; trolleys full of fowls in cane cages were wheeled past; the crowd, predominantly male, as usual, took an elaborate farewell of the passengers. I had plenty of time to think, and look. The scene on the platform was just as it would have been, five years ago. The streets of Cairo, too, with the exception of the ‘foreign’ streets, were just as before. At sunset that afternoon, I had stood on the balcony of the flat where I was staying, and had watched the people below, never ant-like as in big cities of the West, but leisured, in full cry, pushing carts, selling peanuts and roasted maize cobs, balancing coffee cups, zigzagging the hazard across hooting cars and the little red petrol tanks (from which householders buy the spirit for their stoves) drawn by jingling, brass-cluttered donkeys. As I had come out of the building to make for the station, I had passed the caretaker, sitting resting his back against the blast-wall that was put on during the War and has never been taken down; he was eating his bean soup supper preparatory to his night’s work, which consists of climbing into the bed that is pushed into the foyer every evening, and falling asleep under his yellow coverlet.