Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (3 page)

If you were dropped from the sky onto the main street that ran through that district, you could be forgiven if you thought you were somewhere in the West. It was strung from one end to the other with hip, cutting-edge perfume and clothing stores. These places had bright lights, colored walls and fancy displays. They piped in Western music through sophisticated sound systems. The salespeople wore snappy, stylish clothes. The customers were young and cool. There were, amazingly, hardly any portraits of Qaddafi in this part of town. (Perhaps the warehouse was out of stock and the new stores had them on back order.)

There was far less commerce in Libya than in most countries, but this little micro-corner was bustling. I found French cheese (but not prohibited wine), Japanese DVD players, Belgian chocolate and Swiss instant coffee.

At first I thought the only coffee shops in the city could be found along a single block on one of the back streets. Old men sat out front in cheap plastic chairs and grumpily smoked hookahs. That didn’t look like very much fun.

But then I found an Italian-style café fronting Green Square. I ordered a double macchiato and a cheese pastry and actually found a nice dainty table. I looked around and thought, Heck, this could be Italy or even Los Angeles if it weren’t for the total lack of women around. Globalization penetrates even Arab socialist rogue states these days. And what a relief, really. You’d never know you were in the beating heart of a brutal dictatorship while sitting in that little place.

Both my guides, Abdul and Yasir, took me to dinner. We could have eaten in the Italian Quarter. But no. They had to take me out to the Parking Garage Quarter, which is to say, anywhere else but the old city.

I groaned silently to myself. I liked these guys—if not their taste in dining establishments—but I hated being schlepped around all the time and never being asked when or where I wanted to eat.

The only time I truly needed a guide was on the road between Tripoli and Ghadamis.

I couldn’t read the Arabic road signs. Armed soldiers demanded papers at checkpoints. I was grateful my guides had the stacks of papers prepared. But in the city, I was perfectly capable of finding a place to eat on my own. It wasn’t easy, but it could be done with effort and patience.

I appreciated the hospitality, even though it was bought and paid for. Abdul and Yasir seemed to enjoy “buying” my dinner, but I felt micromanaged and babysat. Come here, look at that, sit there, eat this. They were great guys. But I lusted for solitude. If I said so, they would have been offended.

They took me to a restaurant in a neighborhood that was downright North Korean, it was so chock-full of concrete.

“We really hope you like this place,” Yasir said.

It wasn’t quite as bad as a parking garage, but it was a near miss. The main floor was reserved for a wedding, so we were shepherded upstairs to a huge, dimly lit room mostly empty of tables. The wedding party hadn’t arrived yet. There was no one else in the building.

I didn’t know what to say in this gloomy warehouse of a restaurant. I felt like we were the only people out for dinner that night in all of Libya. Abdul and Yasir hoped I would like this place? Oh, the poor dears. I was embarrassed for them and wondered what tourist in his right mind would come to Libya when he could go to Tunisia, Morocco or Turkey instead.

*  *  *

Worlds can’t meet worlds. But people can meet people. I forget who said that, but I like it, and I thought about it as I walked around inside Libya, hanging out and talking to regular folks.

In a nation where so many reported to the secret police, where a sideways word could get you imprisoned or killed, walking around blue-eyed and pale-faced with an American accent had its advantages. I met one shopkeeper who opened right up when he and I found ourselves alone in his store.

“Do Americans know much about Libya?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

He wanted to teach me something about his country, but he didn’t know where to start. So he recited encyclopedia factoids.

He listed the principal resources while counting his fingers. I stifled a smirk when he named the border states. (I hardly needed a sixth-grade geography lesson.) When he told me Arabic was the official language, I wondered if he thought I was stupid or deaf.

“And Qaddafi is our president,” he said. “About him, no comment.” He laughed, but I don’t think he thought it was funny.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Comment away. I don’t live here.”

He thought about that. For a long drawn-out moment, he calculated the odds and weighed the consequences. Then the dam burst.

“We hate that fucking bastard—we have nothing to do with him. Nothing. We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We do our jobs, we go home. If I talk, they will take me out of my house in the night and put me in prison.

“Qaddafi steals,” he told me. “He steals from us.” He spoke rapidly now, twice as fast as before, as though he had been holding back all his life. He wiped sweat off his forehead with trembling hands. “The oil money goes to his friends. Tunisians next door are richer and they don’t even have any oil.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“We get three or four hundred dinars each month to live on. Our families are huge, we have five or six children. It is a really big problem. We don’t make enough to take care of them. I want to live in Lebanon. Beirut is the second Paris. It is civilized! Women and men mix freely in Lebanon.”

*  *  *

Almost everybody I know thought I was crazy to travel to Libya. The unspoken fear was that someone might kill me.

Well, no. Nobody killed me. Nobody even looked at me funny. I knew that’s how it would be before I set out. Still, it’s nice to have the old adage that “people are people” proved through experience.

Libyans were fed a steady diet of anti-Americanism, but it came from a man who kicked them in the stomach and stomped on their face for more than a third of a century. If they bought it, they sure didn’t act like it.

I crossed paths with a middle-aged Englishman in the hallway.

“Is this a good hotel?” he asked.

It sure beat my last place in town. At least I wasn’t stranded out by the towers.

“It’s a good hotel,” I said, not really believing it but grateful for what I had.

“I think it’s bloody awful,” he said.

I laughed. “Well, yes,” I said. “I was just trying to be nice. You should see the place where I stayed when I first got here.”

I heard footsteps behind me, turned around and faced two Arab men wearing coats and ties and carrying briefcases. One wore glasses. The other was bald.

“It has been a long time since I heard that accent,” said the man with the glasses.

I smiled. “It’s been a long time since this accent was here,” I said. Until just a few months earlier, any American standing on Libyan soil was committing a felony.

“We went to college together,” he said, and jerked his thumb toward his friend. “In Lawrence, Kansas, during the ’70s.”

“Yes,” his friend said as he rubbed the bald spot on his head. The two were all smiles now as they remembered. “We took a long road trip up to Seattle.”

“We stayed there for two weeks!” said the first. He sighed like a man recalling his first long-lost love. I watched both their faces soften as they recalled the memories of their youth and adventures abroad in America.

“What a wonderful time we had there,” said the second.

They invited me out to dinner, but I was getting ready to leave. I didn’t want to say no. They looked like they wanted to hug me.

We shook hands as we departed. And as I stepped into the elevator, the first man put his hand on his heart. “Give two big kisses to Americans when you get home,” he said. “From two people in Libya who miss you so much.”

Chapter Two

The Slow Rot of Hosni Mubarak

Egypt, 2005

There’s no way around it: your first impression of a new city and country will be powerfully influenced by whatever you see in your first 15 minutes of walking around. It’s important, then, that you choose the location of your hotel very carefully.

My starting place in Egypt was the Hotel President on the island of Zamalek in the Nile River, supposedly Cairo’s Beverly Hills. The place looks nothing like Beverly Hills. It’s packed from one end to the other with medium-rise apartment towers, most of them knockoffs of the concrete soul-crushers that ring cities in the old Soviet bloc. I found shops, cafés and restaurants on the ground floor, but most were quiet, simple places, dimly lit on the inside, and they were spaced far apart as though Zamalek, despite its packed urban density and higher concentration of wealth per capita, could only support a thin spread of modest establishments.

The streets were remarkably quiet for the center of a metropolitan area of nearly 20 million people, though I heard blaring horns faintly in the distance across the river on the busier mainland. The sidewalks were wide and shaded by dusty green trees. A vaguely vegetable smell, presumably from the Nile, coated the air like a thin slime. A dense foglike haze enveloped the city, partly from automobile pollution but also from farmers out in the delta burning crop waste. It gave my sleepy Zamalek neighborhood a surreal, ghostly pallor that added to the dislocation I always feel when arriving in a new country.

Foreign embassies were all over the island, most of them right next to each other. They were the former mansions of rich Cairenes built in various European styles at the turn of the last century. But after Gamal Abdel Nasser and his so-called Free Officers Movement overthrew King Farouk in 1952, these magnificent homes were nationalized by the state. Nasser wrenched Egypt into the orbit of Soviet Russia with predictably disastrous results. Most of the island’s residents have been living in those drab apartment buildings ever since.

Nasser was long gone, though, by the time I arrived, as was his replacement Anwar Sadat, whom Islamist army officers assassinated in 1981 for signing a peace treaty with Israel. Egypt’s then-current president, Hosni Mubarak, had no interest in Nasser-style radicalism, nor was he brave enough to risk anything if he had to pay a price as Sadat had. He’d been ruling Egypt as a standard-issue status quo authoritarian for the previous quarter-century. The entire country was drowning in torpor. His regime calcified long before I got there.

At midnight I walked along the bank of the Nile. Two commercial pleasure boats—one lit up in neon and both playing Arabic music too loud—passed each other on the otherwise dark and quiet waters. International hotels skyscrapered behind them. Women were allowed out of the house during the day, nearly all with their heads wrapped in scarves, but every person I passed on the street that night was a man. Cairo is more than 10 times larger than Beirut, Lebanon—where I lived at the time—but it’s two or even three orders of magnitude more conservative.

I was surprised that Zamalek was considered upper-class. The sidewalks were crumbling. Almost every apartment building was coated in soot and grime. Many parked cars had been idle so long, they looked like they were covered in volcanic ash. Only the embassies were clean and well maintained.

Some of these people had money, though. Zamalek was dour on the outside, but when I saw through the front windows into the living rooms of some apartments in the older buildings, I had to revise my opinions. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who has high ceilings, color-washed walls, wedding-cake moldings and chandeliers in their living room. My house in the States is not as nice as many of these. Zamalek’s problem was that the neighborhood wasn’t kept up, as if civic pride didn’t exist.

In the 1980s, when travel writer Douglas Kennedy visited Alexandria, the largest city on the Egyptian Mediterranean, renowned painter Sarwat el-Bahr explained a key Egyptian concept to him. “Do you know why America does not understand Egypt? Because they do not understand the meaning of the word
Maaleesh
. In English,
Maaleesh
means ‘doesn’t matter,’ and it is the one word you need to understand Egypt. In America everything is
now, now, now—
make
the money now, make the career now. But in Egypt, everybody believes in life after death, so everything in life is
Maaleesh
.”

That’s how much of Zamalek looked and felt. It simply didn’t matter if the public spaces were dreary. Not to the locals anyway. But it mattered to me. Zamalek disappointed—considering what it was supposed to be like—and I went back to my hotel and picked up my copy of
Travels with a Tangerine
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a British Arabist expat who lives in Yemen.

“Few visitors have liked Cairo on first sight,” he wrote. “‘Uff!’ exclaimed an eighth-century caliph, ‘She is the mother of stenches!’ Later, a geographer wondered why anyone should have wanted to build a city ‘between a putrid and mephitic river, the corrupt effluvia of which cause disease and rot food, and a dry and barren mountain range devoid of greenery.’ The ground teemed with rats, scorpions, fleas, and bugs, the air with miasmas. In Cairo Symon Semeon buried his companion Brother Hugo, who had succumbed to an attack of dysentery and fever ‘caused by a north wind.’ My guidebook, compiled a century after I.B.’s visit, was disturbingly frank about the dangers of living in a polluted high-rise city where light and air rarely penetrate the dark alleyways. Its author, al-Maqrizi, warned that ‘the traveler approaching Cairo sees before him a depressing black wall beneath a dust-laden sky, from which sight his soul shrinks and flees away.’”

What I saw wasn’t nearly as bad as all
that
, at least. And the next day, when I found 26 July Street and the streets adjacent to it, I changed my mind about Zamalek. (I later changed my mind again and again about not only Zamalek but also all of Cairo.)

26 July had an elevated freeway that ran right over the top of it, giving the street a dark,
Blade Runner
feel. That may sound like a complaint, but somehow it worked. It reminded me a bit of Chicago, a city I love and wish I could visit more often. You can barely see the sky from the sidewalk, but the street is brilliantly lit up at night. All the usual neighborhood goods are for sale: shoes, watches, clothing, glasses, pharmaceuticals, snacks and so on.