In 1991 I made my third trip to Egypt, this time not as a tour escort, but as a scriptwriter for a documentary on a cooperative agricultural project between Egypt and Israel. Filmmaker Jack Ofield and I arrived in Cairo after a week with the Israeli scientists on the project. We arrived in the middle of Ramadan, the holy month of Islam, but found that was only the beginning of the contrasts between these two countries who seem to share little more common ground that a tenuous peace and an arid landscape. The following journal entry is presented in three installments. The others should be posted soon enough to retain the thread of narrative.
Cairo curio shop too small for its own sign.
©1991, James A. Clapp
Part I
Somehow the idea of having a meeting at 11PM didn’t seem that absurd. After all, there wasn’t much chance of getting any sleep at this hotel, or for that matter maybe anywhere in Egypt. Ramadan sort of reverses the circadian patterns of the day: with no eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset, the night becomes the time of feasting, socializing, and, is seems, taking meetings.
At the Hilton the nights have been anything but restful. Last night there was a wedding and reception in the huge atrium and swimming pool area of the hotel. A band played amplified Arabic pop music until 4AM, by which time the furious traffic of Tahrir Square that the hotel backs up to took over the insomnia-producing din.
I had already asked for a room change away from the atrium. The hotel manager cheerfully complied; it was a room further away from the atrium, but closer to the square. The new room came with an enormous bouquet of fresh-cut flowers; a nice gesture of contrition (unless it was left-over from the wedding), but the effect was to make the room smell like a funeral parlor.
I had managed to get a nap in the afternoon, so when our driver-minder, Hisham, arrived with the government car to pick Jack and me up for the 11PM meeting I was almost relieved. It looked like they were setting up for another wedding for tonight.
Hisham had been out driver since we arrived in Egypt. His English was quite good, if perhaps colored with a few too many American idioms from pop culture. His current favorite American pop singer was a woman named Sadé, and he had already extracted a promise from me to send him her latest tapes when I arrived back home. He was pleasant-looking, with that ‘nappy’ Egyptian hair cut close, and a bit pudgy as young Egyptians go. I think he comes from a fairly well-off family. And, like many of his age and social class, he seems to be doing work that is well below his education and training. He is a chauffeur with a master’s in public administration.
At Doqqi, the area of Cairo of government bureaus, ministries and the university, we were ushered into an anteroom to the Minister’s office. Here, typical of most every meeting, we were served tea or cola, offered cigarettes and some cookies, and made to wait while being chatted up by various ministerial underlings. We sat, smoked, drank and chatted for the better part of an hour. Now approaching 12:30AM I couldn’t help thinking of contrasts with the experience we’d had with officials in Israel.
The joint agricultural program between Egypt and Israel on which we were preparing a script had been somewhat of a challenge since its inception. Initially funded by a grant from an American foundation looking for some basis to strengthen the peaceful relations between the two nations since the historic visit of Anwar Sadat to Israel, the program now involved the U.S. Government and several universities. The challenge was more than just overcoming the former antipathies between these two Middle-Eastern adversaries, but also to find a type endeavor that would have a long-term benefit to each of them. My working title for the documentary treatment was called “Common Ground.”
The two countries did have a Semitic heritage in common, but this has done little in the past to sew amity in racial brotherhood. They drew their religions from much of the same myths and legends, but they found more reason to fight each other than pray together over that. But they also had to squeeze from their parched and parsimonious landscape a life and livelihood. Much of that landscape was desert. They should both be interested in finding ways to make the desert bloom. That became the joint project, on which Jack and I were preparing to document.
We had met with the Israeli scientists and officials a week earlier. Their meetings had all been in austere offices, in the field, or in labs. They were conducted on a tight schedule, were devoid of interruptions, and began and concluded promptly on time. All very business-like and efficient, very Israeli.
So in the time we sat drinking tea and chatting in the ante-room at Doqqi we might have been able to conduct two or three Israeli-style meetings. The Egyptian meeting had not even started and it was going on 1AM. All of the meetings in Egypt had been pretty much this way. We could only wonder what it was like when the scientists and officials from Israel took meetings in Egypt.
At one-fifteen we were ushered into the Deputy Minister’s office. My first impression was that this was what it must have been like to enter Benito Mussolini’s office in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Il Duce had a desk at the end of an office the size of a ballroom, and visitors had to walk about forty yards across a hardwood floor to reach his desk. It must have been intimidating.
The minister’s office wasn’t quite that large, but it was huge by any standards and in its center was a meeting table large enough to accommodate about twenty-five chairs along each side. At the far end of the table sat the minister, surrounded by phones, a few piles of papers, and the ever-present feature of every Egyptian government office we had visited, a legion of supernumeraries-in-waiting.
We were shown to seats along the side to the left of the minister, a couple of officials took up places opposite us. We got to stare at each other because the minister was on one of the phones, speaking authoritatively in rapid Arabic. For all we knew he could be ordering pizza. I wouldn’t have minded a slice or two, as something to soak up the endless pots of tea, another of which had been placed before us.
The minister was a large, heavy-set man, handsome, with thinning dark hair, piercing eyes and a growing paunch. He looked more Greek or Italian to me than Egyptian. He flipped through papers during his conversation on the phone and no one else spoke. Jack and I decided to remain silent as well, and I embellished some of my notes to pass the time. I also noticed that my bladder was sending signals to my brain about all the tea I had sent to it.
Just as I had decided that it might make things a bit more comfortable if I visited the men’s room the minister put down the receiver and greeted us warmly. I didn’t need to hear him ask if we would like anything else to drink. After a few other preliminaries and some kibitzing with some of the officials on the other side of the table there commenced what had to be one of the most frustrating meetings I had ever participated in my life.
My presentation was interrupted in nearly every paragraph by an incoming phone call, or some aide or another coming into the room with a question for the minister or with paper’s requiring his signature. Usually he just waved to me to put myself on “pause” while an aide handed him the phone receiver, or showed him where his signature was required. Then he would say: “So, and after you visit the facility at Burg Al Arab you will. . . ?” repeating where I had left-off as a cue for me to continue.
What should have been a thirty-minute meeting dragged out, to the extreme distress to my brain and bladder, for over two hours. It was now nearing 2AM, by Egyptian Ramadan schedule that’s just about lunchtime, which brought a merciful adjournment to the meeting in spite of loose ends and unresolved issues that didn’t seem to matter at all to the minister.
“You ready to ‘rock and roll’?” Hisham asked back in the ante-room.
“Huh?” I said. I understood the idiom, but wasn’t sure he did.
“Rock and roll, have some fun, you know. Where would you like to go? People are eating now. Many restaurants are open. It’s Ramadan.”
“Hey, if I want to party it up all I have to do is go back to the Hilton. There’s probably a couple of weddings right outside my room right now,” I replied. I would have liked to go back to the hotel and get some sleep, but I knew that was impossible.
“I am available to take you wherever you prefer.” Hisham insisted.
Jack didn’t seem to have a preference, other than getting some sleep to rest his ‘curse-of-the-Pharaohs’ bronchitis.
“Tell you what I’d like to do,” I said, half expecting that Hisham’s offer wasn’t really a plenary one, “I’d like to go out to Giza and climb a pyramid, preferably Kufu’s. The only time I’ve seen them at night was at that sound and light show they have, but that’s at a distance and very touristic. I’d like to climb up to the top and look at the city and the Nile in the moonlight.”
Hisham looked a little surprised, but Jack didn’t.
“Pyramids?”
“Pyramids. At Giza. Those big piles of stones.” I said, making a triangular shape with my hands. Hisham missed the irony of my little joke; I think Hisham was thinking about food and music, and maybe women, not pyramids.
“OK, pyramids,” he said resignedly. “We will go to Giza.” End of Part I
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 4.29.2004)