28 Feb. - 6 March 2002
Issue No.575
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 Feb. - 6 March 2002 Issue No.575 |
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An unofficial walkabout
Ataba Square: here is the fire station, with its funny little turret, and here the fire engines, bright and shining red. The doors are always open, the firemen prepared. And in the centre of the Square, beyond railings and gates, the grass is always green. And there is the police station, there the arcades. Carriage lamps hang, matte black heavy, from the central post depot painted pastel pink and grey. It is a tiny slice of toy-town, drowning in exhaust fumes, falling apart beneath the weight of the crowds. Unless, that is, it is the second day of the Eid when the cars are somewhere else and the crowds are at home. Then the Square emerges, a shadow, no doubt, of its earlier self, but sufficiently substantial to suggest a more accommodating time.
No time to linger, though, not if your destination is Sultan Hassan and there is still the length of Mohamed Ali Street to be traversed. There are surprisingly few interior spaces in this city that satisfy: it is not a place that does insides particularly well. Sultan Hassan, though, is one of the most honourable exceptions, and it was the place I wanted to be, on the second day of the Eid. But it was not to be.
A stroll down the length of Mohamed Ali Street, more litter strewn than usual with plastic bags, those thin, pink, green and white bags that have become so ubiquitous caught in the wind and blown high above the buildings, leads to a very closed Sultan Hassan. The gates are firmly locked.
Horses canter around the traffic island at the front of the mosque, with paying passengers on their backs. On the road proper boys who look barely old enough to be out alone hire motorbikes for LE15 pounds a time and drive around in circles, seemingly possessed by a comprehensive death wish. Sitting on a wall I am given a brief history of the Citadel by one passer-by and then asked a series of slightly too personal questions by another whose intentions, I suspect, are not entirely honourable. Everyone is in holiday mode and the weather perfect.
Sultan Hassan
It is not a day to be sitting at home: by a series of backstreets and alleyways I make my way to Port Said Street, intending to cut down towards Bab Zuweila and see the newly restored gates. Apparently, when removed -- for the first time several centuries, possibly the first time ever -- thousands of human teeth fell out of the woodwork, placed there, presumably, in the hope of securing good fortune for their former owners.
In the backstreets and alleyways every second shop appears to be a barber, and in the last decade barbers have come a long, long way. When I arrived in Cairo back street barbers were desultory, fly- blown, neon-lit and painted green. Now they are marble and mirror clad, and glitzy beyond belief, with names like Hassan Star, and a remarkable array of clippers and other accessories. The most popular are full to overflowing: young men call advice to their friends in the chair, friends who seem to be demanding of the barber that the lower half of the skull be shaved, leaving a wedge-like shelf of hair above. Men's hair dressing, it would seem, is a growth area in an otherwise shrinking economy, one of those bright spots that government statistics have yet to spotlight. None of the economic ministries have, to my knowledge, posited personal grooming as a possible route out of recession.
Finally emerging back on Mohamed Ali Street I make my way to Bab Zuweila, not yet having realised that the area through which I am about to pass is a major collection point for the fleeces of slaughtered sheep. Soon, on both sides of the road, these are stacked to shoulder height, with strings of gore attached, creating a valley of death through which flows a muddy rivulet of blood. And the fleeces go on and on, stacked higher and higher.
There comes a point in every journey when the sneaking suspicion begins to grow that perhaps it would be wise to cut your losses and turn back. And though I have always prided myself on not being overly sentimental when it comes to animals -- I had for days ignored, admittedly with growing difficulty, the plaintiff mooing of the two cows, the baaing of the three sheep that had been temporarily housed in the garage of my apartment building and which I passed daily -- the remnants of so many animals was becoming increasingly hard to stomach. Without the solace of a morbid fascination with entrails, something I can understand only on an abstract level and not when presented with the technicoloured reality -- the only thing to do was steel myself into automatic pilot and pretend that I was not walking through the ovian equivalent of an elephants' graveyard. It became less a question of seeing no evil than of seeing nothing at all, while at the same time trying to pick a relatively safe pathway through the river of blood.
The result of such self-willed blindfolding was that by the time I reached the gates I was so happy to skip through and move beyond the heaps of gore that the newly restored gates were the last thing on my mind. Relief takes many forms: forgetting the object of your endeavours being perhaps one of the more extreme. A gentle walk from thereon, to the haven of a café, a seat somewhere near the back, in the gloom, an uncomfortable chair, and everyone still in holiday mode. It wasn't quite the inside I had originally in mind, but sometimes the dingiest of interiors is preferable to the great outdoors. And toy-town wasn't toy town any more.
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