A tank at the campus gates

The first hurdle to beginning my course at Cairo University was finding where I was to study. The only information we had been given in London was the name of the professor, who belonged to the Faculty of Arts . 'Arts' according to my Arabic dictionary was funuun. I jumped into a taxi and asked for kulliyat al-funuun. This evoked the usual reaction of puzzlement on the part of the driver, and the usual good hearted determination to get the foreigner to somewhere that might not be entirely unconnected with the required destination.

We ground our way to the university campus at Giza, where we asked mystified students and doorman for kulliyat al-funuun. Eventually somebody directed us back towards the city and we turned onto the bridge leading to Zamalek, the posh diplomatic quarter on a lush island in the middle of the Nile. We stopped outside a garden with high hedges enclosing a lawn where young students painted at easels. One of them came to the gate and solved the mystery: funuun meant 'arts' in the sense of painting and sculpture. The word for the 'arts' of literature, history and so on was aadaab. Back we crawled to Giza where the the kulliyat aadaab was located after all, with the driver sporting an 'I knew that' expression.

Swinging past a roundabout near the university I saw one of the traffic accidents that were so frequent in Cairo and yet treated with apparent apathy: A bus with as many passengers on the outside as inside lurched into a turn, and a man fell off the back hitting the road like a sack of meat, where he lay with the traffic streaming round him.

The professor wasn't at work so I went home on the Nile river bus; I'd had enough of the roads.

The half dozen or so UK students in my group had dribbled into Cairo over a week or so, and one day we assembled in the Professor's office to find that the university didn't really know what to do with us. We were introduced to a group of Romanian students, who sat on the opposite of the room so that a sort of imaginary Iron Curtain separated us. Some of them wore dark glasses like Maciek in Ashes and Diamonds. These were the days of the Soviet sphere of influence, and I suppose that countries like Egypt and Cuba were often sent fraternal benison in the form of Eastern European students with poor eyesight.

There being nothing in the way of a course in Arabic for foreigners, the university decided that we would have tutorials given by some of its dynamic young academics  This required us to buy copies of the textbooks based on their masters theses - apparently a normal way of supplementing academic incomes. I only recall one of these texts, a work on the ancient Arabic epic Sīrat al-amīra D̲h̲āt al-Himma . In fact I didn't have a clue it was about an ancient Arabic epic. We sat befogged through our classes with the lecturer assuming that everybody knew exactly what Sīrat al-amīra D̲h̲āt al-Himma was. Thinking back, this wouldn't have been much different from me explaining the life of Worzel Gummidge to a group of visiting Cambodians.

One of the bright spots of the tutorials was the sufragi who brought coffee. Tall and moustachioed, and wearing a khaki university uniform, he quietly took orders without writing anything down, and slipped back into the classroom later with a large trayful of tiny cups. At least this kept us awake during long classes when we went in a circle translating the lecturers' books aloud a sentence at a time.

I attended a few mass lectures and was saddened by the number of poor students with eyes cloudy from trachoma. Such students were never seen on the campus of the American University in Cairo, where glamorous pouting girl students were dropped off by men with gold neck chains driving sports cars.

Graduates of government universities were, I was told, guaranteed a job. I saw evidence of this in a Bank Misr branch one day when I exchanged a travellers cheque, and my documents spent forty five minutes being passed down a row of desks, each manned by a graduate whose task was to read every word twenty times and initial in triplicate. Wincing with diarrhoea cramps, I debated jumping into a taxi sans passport and money and coming back three or four hours later.

Over the weeks of September I got into the routine of walking from my flat near Tahrir Square to the Nile river ferry stop and taking the boat to Giza. I always entered the boat through the doorway, but most of the passengers climbed through the windows, probably an ingrained habit of the Cairenes given that every public transport conveyance had only a quarter of the seats required for the passengers. I avoided buses because they were hideously crowded. One day in Adly Street I saw a tram, a taxi and a bus collide. The small boys in nightshirts who rode on the bumpers were tossed into the air like footballs and crashed onto the road in bloody heaps. I dashed into a barbers shop and screamed at the owner to call an ambulance; he shrugged and carried on shaving a big stubbled chin. This happened every day.

The day after the war began I went to the university and found the campus gates locked and a tank parked outside. We never returned to our classes. It would be unfair to say that our lecturers must have been relieved that they no longer had to teach the foreigners; the Egyptian forces suffered ghastly losses and it is certain that our teachers' families would have been touched by death.

Our professor from London visited us briefly after the airport reopened. He took us in an army jeep to an avant garde theatre performance about Ancient Egypt where students - perhaps the ones with the easels - chanted Horus, Horus, Horus for a long time.

 

Note: I was fortunate enough to be taught in London by Dr Fouad Megally, a distinguished scholar and a gifted and kind teacher. I learned recently that he passed away in 2011. His Times obituary is at http://announcements.thetimes.co.uk/obituaries/timesonline-uk/obituary.aspx?pid=150431487 . A fuller obituary appears in The Glastonbury Review: Issue 120, July 2011.

© Stuart Campbell 2014

Read more about my writing at http://stubooks.blogspot.com.au/

By scrapheap from Piraeus to Alexandria

We tried to catch a taxi at Piraeus station but couldn't master the local technique of running alongside the moving vehicles, grabbing the door handles, and claiming possession. Instead I hefted our two heavy suitcases under a blinding September sun from the station to the dock. By the time we found the MV Cynthia my arms were as taut as fanbelts and my anaesthetized fingers looked like salami.

 We had tickets to Alexandria for a double cabin, bought through the National Union of Students in London. The NUS wanted to sight our marriage certificate before they would sell us the tickets and had thoughtfully franked the reverse of our Gibraltar Registry Office document with a big inky stamp.

When we arrived on the deck of the reeking Cynthia the purser shook his head in amazement that travellers with such cheap tickets could possibly believe they were entitled to a double cabin. My wife and I were separated and ordered to different parts of the stinking tub well below the waterline. I lugged the two huge suitcases to her cabin, dropped off the one we thought might contain her clothes, and then continued to drag the other one like a cockroach through the superheated rusting passageways. But I was spared: My assigned eight-berth cabin was festooned with frilly frocks; no place for a man. I used my last ounces of energy to drag the hated suitcase to the top deck. The grudging purser directed me to a double cabin above the waterline, and I threw myself onto the lower bunk and hung my throbbing hands over the side.

With the circulation to my hands partly restored I went aloft, or perhaps abaft, and searched for my wife on the deck. The greenish tinge of her face augured badly; we were still tied up alongside the caisson wall, but the rocking of the ship, the stench of diesel, and the hot greasy miasma from the vents above the kitchens had started to do their work.

The MV Cynthia juddered out of the harbour at a funny angle like a water rat with a crushed leg. It was her last voyage before the scrapheap.

In the afternoon the ship's swimming pool was filled up. It was barely big enough to fit six people standing but the weight of the water taken on board strained the heaving engines almost to a standstill. We hung around the canvas awning near the pool to escape the heat. An Egyptian man in swimming trunks did an elaborate calisthenic routine and introduced himself. He was captivated that I could pronounce his name properly, and asked me to repeat it over and over: "Please, what is my name?" We escaped to another part of the ship but wherever we went he seemed to be waiting in his trunks behind a lifeboat or a stanchion, and would pop out and inanely ask "Please, what is my name?" I would repeat robotically,  "Mar'i Kamil S-". I leave his last name incomplete in case he is still alive and wants to be my friend on Facebook.

In the evening the toilets overflowed and we had to hop through sewage to get to the hotbox  where dinner was served to the third class passengers. A waiter probably named Malvolio guarded the kitchen entrance with a filthy tea towel over his arm. The food - it hardly needed guarding - was Kit-E-Kat mashed into macaroni tubes. We gagged and picked over our bowls, but our table companions - cadaverous British hippies who had been in India for months - golloped theirs down, and then finished our leftovers. Our hearts leapt as fat peaches were handed out, and then shrivelled when they were cut apart to reveal the plump maggots within.

We parted late that night on the upper deck, but not before I had my first real conversation in Arabic outside a classroom. While my wife leaned over the rail to find some air that didn't smell of Kit-E-Kat, I watched a Lebanese family chatting in the moonlight. There was another ship in the distance and a man in the group commented that it was from the same shipping line as the Cynthia. He actually said nafsi shirka, 'the same company'. I grabbed my chance and attempted to join the conversation by loudly intoning nafsi shirka with a questioning intonation. On reflection I suppose I was saying, "Oh, family of complete strangers, is it indeed a fact that the ship we see is from the same company as the ship we are on?"

The family turned to stare at the apparition at the rail whence the odd utterance had come: A moustachioed wraith with shoulder length black hair supporting a young woman who was sobbing and retching under the moon.

I spent the night awake in terror listening to the stranger in the upper bunk making long rhythmic noises like a razor being sharpened on a leather strop.

At Beirut - not yet torn apart by the civil war - we ordered massive plates of rice and minted lamb in a restaurant but could barely eat a few spoonsful, so shrunken were our stomachs. We made it back to the Cynthia by smell alone, and fought the crush of Egyptians who were boarding with boxes of Lebanese apples as big as babies' heads.

As we sailed for Cyprus a black and yellow flag was raised - cholera! - and instead of entering Limassol harbour we stood offshore in quarantine. A Mercedes Benz was hoisted from the Cynthia's deck on davits and was swung wobbling onto a wooden barge, which puttered off to Limassol with a few passengers.

Like a malodorous pariah, the Cynthia limped towards Egypt, its decks still stacked with boxes of apples. Officials came out to meet us in Alexandria harbour and we were lined up and each given a large white cholera pill, the composition and efficacy of which we knew nothing. The officials had a loud discussion about the apples and a decision was made: Destroy them! They may be infected! The boxes were broken apart and the passengers ate the apples.

Some hours later the Cynthia eased her dented flanks alongside the berth and the engines stopped grinding. We lined up in an immigration hall where men in uniform took all our passports and made a toppling pile of them on a desk. I watched in anxiety: How would they return the passports to the correct owners? What if I got the wrong passport and I had to spend the rest of my life as Mar'i Kamil S-?

 

© Stuart Campbell 2014

Read more about my writing at http://stubooks.blogspot.com.au/

The orientalist stripped bare

The address we had been given was written in English: 'Bustan Said', and that was it. This piece of information had been passed along a chain of relatives from Egypt to Australia to Britain by letter and telephone, and via several languages and alphabets.

On our first night in Egypt we booked into the Hotel Cecil in Alexandria, where Somerset Maugham had stayed and the British Secret Service used to rent a permanent suite. Our mission was to travel to Cairo the next morning to find my wife's grandmother's boarding house. I spent the evening combing the telephone directory for anyone with Madame P's surname and calling them up. "No, not here. Who's that?", "Who, who? Not here!" It didn't help that the phone book was in Arabic and that Madame P's Armenian name could have been spelt in at least six ways. But this was 1973: People didn't expect to locate some exact spot on the surface of the earth in microseconds; people were used to being stood up, missing each other at planned meetings; people were used to unanswered phones. We went to bed without misgivings.

The train took us through the Delta to Cairo the next day, and I fought for and won a taxi at Ramses Station, asking the driver to take us to Bustan Said Street. I tried pronouncing 'Said' in several ways - the four bald English letters gave about half the information needed to guess the Arabic word - and the driver lurched fatalistically into the traffic, no doubt praying that the mysterious location would magically appear before his rheumy eyes.

It didn't of course, although we did crawl up and down Bustan Street many times, craning to see past the bogged traffic and the sticky fingers of the child beggars on the car window, in case we saw a huge illuminated sign for Pension P.  Nothing.

"Take us to a hotel,"  I said, and he drove for miles, eventually stopping outside an unmarked establishment in an empty street blighted with dusty urban poverty. We refused a squalid room upstairs with six frowzy beds, and resumed our journey. This time I said to the driver, "Take us to funduq urubbii", 'a European hotel'. I still cringe at the memory of the clumsy request. We were delivered to the posh Borg Hotel, where our room had just one bed.

My only experience of the Arab World had been our honeymoon in Tangier, a memory naturally tinted with romance, or more specifically The Romance of the Orient. Our taxi trip had left me with the impression that most of Cairo looked like a rubbish dump, but waking up in a decent hotel with a view of the Nile restored my hope that the Orient was out there to be found. Even better, the front desk staff knew exactly which street Pension P was in - Bustan El-Saeedi Street, right opposite the Filfila Restaurant. With the missing syllables restored to Madame P's address, we checked out of the Borg and took another cab.

And here we were, outside an Italianate apartment building in chaotic Bab El-Luq with all the prescribed features of The Orient around us: Men in nightshirts and turbans, donkeys, street stalls, thronging crowds, beggars, hullabaloo. We took the shuddering birdcage lift to the fourth floor and were admitted to a large vestibule with a dining table and a dozen or so chairs, and seven or eight doors leading to bedrooms around the sides. A couple of professional gents sat us down and politely explained that Madame P was out shopping. They sent out for fuul medammes and boiled eggs while we waited. The gents were two of Madame P's boarders. Some weeks later, one of them - an army journalist - gave me a signed copy of a book he had written in praise of President Sadat. He inscribed it in Arabic, 'To my friend the orientalist Stuart Campbell'.

Now might be a good point to take stock of how things stood with the Orient in 1973, at least among the people that I mixed with. Despite its glee at the dismantling of the colonial order, nouveau intellectual youth culture in the UK had inherited the cultural blueprint of the Orient drawn up by former generations: The Orient of the Beatles and the bandwagon Indian mystics was sensual, passive, spiritual, dismissive of material concerns. This hippy formulation wasn't much different from that of T.E. Lawrence's views of the Arabs he led at the fall of Damascus in 1918. As for me, I spent the first two years of my degree luxuriating in the works of old-time Orientalists like William Lane, Richard Burton and Gertrude Bell. The task, I believed, was for the West and the East to reach mutual understanding, mutual respect, world peace and all that. The bit that I missed was that we, the colonialists, had written the rules and the East didn't have a say. Five years later the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said launched his seminal book Orientalism, changing for ever the rules of intellectual engagement in the study of cultures. After Edward Said nobody wanted to be called an orientalist.

Let's return to the dining room at Madame P's. We had finished the fuul and eggs, and there was still no sign of Granny P. The professional gents sent for a young man, a university student, who must have lived in the building, and he was told to take us around the neighbourhood to look for Madame P. We went from shop to shop while the student practised his English on us. I was expecting him to be interested and flattered (I cringe deeply again) that a British student had gone to the trouble of studying his language and his culture. Instead he questioned me brusquely about why I was in Egypt, eventually becoming quite sarcastic and tossing in terms like 'imperialist' and 'invader'. We didn't find Madame P, but by the time we returned to the Pension she was there, and the sour student slipped away. There were hugs and kisses, and my wife, her grandmother and an ex-orientalist settled down to catch up on family history.

© Stuart Campbell 2014

Read more about my writing at http://stubooks.blogspot.com.au/

Tea and sugar for foreigners

Early November 1973. The Egyptian Army is struggling to maintain its gains in Sinai.

Each day Cairo runs out of something else as the country is blockaded: Matches one day, toilet paper the next, cooking oil ... The blood bank has set up a loudspeaker outside our house and we receive hostile glares as the woman's voice, half weeping, half imploring, urges the passers by to give blood for their sons and brothers at the front. Bandaged soldiers with crutches have begun to appear on the streets. Rumours are flying: An Israeli spy disguised as a Moroccan was caught in Ramses Square this morning; a Moroccan spy with an Israeli identity card was caught near the synagogue in Shari' 'Adli at lunchtime.

Then there is a rumour that foreigners are entitled to rations. Provisions are running short. My wife's grandmother has a secret hoard of sugar. She shows us the US dollars sewn into her dresses in advance of her escape to California one day. Have you heard that foreigners can get rations, we ask. She shrugs in the  careworn Armenian manner: Kalaam faadi - 'It's all just talk'.

But other foreigners have heard of it too. You need bitaaqa tamwiin, they say, a 'provision permit', a ration card. Where can you get it? Ramses Square is the consensus  among the foreigners studying at the universities. We set off on foot.  There's nothing much else to do since they put a tank outside Cairo University and locked the gates the day the war started.

Crossing the tram tracks we face a massive government building with a sandbagged blast wall across the entrance; all the big buildings have thrown them up in expectation of bombing. Vast rowdy queues thread out the doors and into the street, all composed of shouting foreign men, mostly Africans. We reconnoitre the ballooning masses of people, unable to make sense of any order that might underlie the pandemonium, but suddenly we spot some Europeans. You need an application form, they say - istimaara - and you get it from a scribe by the entrance.

In a gap between the Africans sit half a dozen Arab men in long robes squatting on chairs before tiny desks. We are beckoned by an old scribe with a milky eye. Professor, we want a istimaara for a ration card please. The Professor scribbles on a blank sheet of paper and barks 'name?'. We tell him our chunky English names and he turns them into fluid sweeps of Arabic on the paper. 'Address?', 'nationality?' It all goes down and in seconds we hand over a few piastres and take our forms.

The interior of the building is a stifling ants nest of African men criss-crossing, stopping, starting, meeting, parting, waiting, pushing. We spot some Europeans in a small queue: This is for non-African foreigners they say. We shelter with them and our line slowly works its way towards a tiny enquiry window. Every five minutes a foreigner peels off with a look of joy, and the next hands his form to the civil servant inside the window.

We are two places behind the leader when the window closes. The queue behind us has been more vigilant and sees another tiny window opening ten feet away, and surges towards it, leaving us at the back of the new line. After an hour we come away with our ration books, roughly printed on hairy beige paper with pages bearing squares to be stamped to verify the receipt of tiny monthly quantities of tea, sugar and oil.

Next day we visit the government supermarket in our quarter. We've never been in there before because normally there is nothing for sale except for tins of communist peaches and gherkins, presumably excess stock from a five year plan in Bulgaria or Ukraine. But now it has become the ration supply centre. Normally we use the baqaala - the grocery a few shops down where I caused a riot of mirth and admiration when we first arrived and I asked for toilet paper in impeccable Classical Arabic.

But now the baqaala is empty.  The normally comatose shopkeepers in the government supermarket are fighting on the home front, bravely stamping ration cards and heroically handing over goods to customers at the front of the horde packed into the shop.

We slowly move to the the front, conspicuous among the robes in our jeans and Levi shirts. As we get near to the counter a disgruntled voice from the back says:

Shaay wa sukkar lil agaanib - 'tea and sugar for the foreigners.'

Again: Shaay wa sukkar lil agaanib, this time more voices.

I hand over the ration cards. 'The sugar's finished' the official says.

The whole shop is chanting:

Shaay wa sukkar lil agaanib

Shaay wa sukkar lil agaanib

We turn and push through the sweating, glaring crowd. In the street outside my wife says 'Show me what we got', and I hold out an envelope with a spoonful of tea leaves inside.

© Stuart Campbell 2014

Read more about my writing at http://stubooks.blogspot.com.au/