Noor Naga

A Novel

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Tabea Lüth

When I arrived at Ramses Station in Cairo, the air was people. They clogged every street and then piled on top of each other in buildings twenty stories high. 

“Post-revolution, everyone was coming back all excited. Ask me where they are now.” I looked at her blankly. She made pedaling cycles with her cigarette hand until I recited: Where are they now? Then she continued as though I hadn't. “Twenty pounds to the dollar. This is the exchange rate today. A year ago, it was eight. Tell your mother I miss her.”

We rose from our graves, patted the dirt off each other, looked each other in the eye. An entire population crawling out of a mass grave to hold those who’d buried us accountable, and in doing so daring to imagine another reality.

Cairo is not what I expected, but the shock is one of scale rather than content. I expected traffic and poverty and pollution, but not like this. It’s a city dialed up to its extreme. 

At some point after the Rabaa massacre of 2013, after the sugar crisis and the floating of the Egyptian pound last November, after it became clear that all the men who had disappeared from their beds at night for tweeting were not going to be released, the unthinkable happened: people began to long for the days of Hosni Mubarak. 

Later when we were alone in the street, she asked me if Sami didn’t want Muslims in Riche because his family was Coptic. Adorable. “They don’t hate Muslims, they hate the poor”, I laughed. 

Arabic: this language that has only ever existed for me in kitchens and bedrooms, baby talk, breakfast chatter, Eid mornings at the mosque (before my father converted to astrology), goodnight kisses after Kalima wa Dimna, or fever talk when I was feverish at age five. 

She was alone in this city, which explained some things. She was Egyptian enough to wax her arms but American enough to shave her head. She was Egyptian enough to sit at the ahwa under the bridge but American enough to think a silk nightie was appropriate wear at the ahwa under the bridge. She uncrossed her legs when she heard the athan, but then kept them wide at the knees like a truck driver. 

It was in moments like this that she reminded me of the Germans and Italians I used to sleep with, who were so predictable with their sympathies in the months after the revolution. We'd be approaching a barefoot child doing his homework on the sidewalk and I just knew they would start fumbling with their purses. I just knew they would pull out an egregious sum, squat beside the kid, ask where his shoes were and his mother, take a picture of him without permission. They thought it made them look conscientious instead of guilty and voyeuristic. I always let these women empty their pockets without commenting, since there was something retributive about the exchange, a kind of tourist tax. 

Where the roads are numbered (rarely), they are not ordered consecutively, and when they are named, no one uses those names. The landmarks are arbitrary-a discontinued post office, a banana-seller. The bridges are referred to by dates. “I’ll take the 26th of July to Zamalek and then you point where you want to get off”, the driver says politely. It's as though the city were deliberately designed to resist comprehension and to discipline those who left for daring to return. You have either lived here and you know, or you never have and never will. 

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