open and tolerant to different views. You can find resentment, especially from the fundamentalists, about colonialism and foreign authors. But most writers appreciate other writers. I always look back to the era of Durrell and the other Europeans as a good time.”
“Better than now, when you have your own literature and identity as a nation?”
“In some ways, yes.” The waiter brought a plate of salted peanuts, and Meguid helped himself and poured more tea. “We had good schools back then. Small classes. Fifteen students. Now it’s seventy students. They taught English. They took us to the cinema. I saw Moby Dick and Gone With the Wind. Cinema was my guide. I read the novels afterward. I read Moby Dick as a Koran. The language is very deep. It has the taste of a religious book. I admire many American writers—Watt Whitman, Faulkner, Steinbeck. I read Tortilla Flat and it changed my life.”
Words spilled out of him, not wistfully, not ruefully, but with genuine pleasure at recollecting his youth and what, surprisingly, he regarded as the city’s golden age. His fondness for American and European mass culture, for even the kitschiest manifestations of colonial occupation, astonished me.
“Three magic things we had in Alex when I was a boy,” he said. “Cinema. Nightclubs for foreigners. And sailors coming into port. Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum were our heroes.”
“What about Nasser? What about Sayyid Qutb?” I asked about the godfather of modern Islamic radicalism.
Meguid gave a weary flick of the hand. “Nasser had Sayyid Qutb hanged in 1966 for subversion. That’s politics, not heroes. I used to be a good socialist. I was in the Communist Party. But when I went to Russia I saw it was a lie. This wasn’t the Soviet Union we dreamed of. It was corrupt. You couldn’t even find a photocopy machine. They thought it was a machine for spying.
“Then I lived eleven months in Saudi Arabia. I wrote a novel about it, The Other Place. I look on Saudi as a kind of hell. You can’t live in a city without music or art.”
“Do other Egyptians agree with that?”
“Some. The educated ones. In private they say what I do.”
“And the rest of the people?”
“We’re in crisis. We changed from socialism to capitalism. The government says they encourage capitalism, but it doesn’t want to accept capitalist practices like strikes and other freedoms. Our leaders don’t really believe in competition. They give one guy, a friend in politics, the import business. They give another friend the export business.”
A loud buzzer sounded. It might have been an alarm warning us that we were discussing forbidden topics. But no, it was Meguid’s cell phone. He pried it open and spoke in Arabic. He stood up and paced, listening and nodding. Then he shut it and said, “My wife. Where were we? I hope my ideas about Egypt don’t discourage you on your trip. There are good things all across North Africa. I even like Libya. I don’t feel like a stranger there. I like Morocco—Casablanca, Marrakech, Fez. I went there and it seemed like an open society.”
Out of courtesy I asked about his current writing projects, and his comments about our profession sounded sadly familiar. Does there exist a writer in the world who, regardless of his fame or fortune, doesn’t feel he’s been fucked over by editors, writers and reviewers?
“My publisher in Beirut steals from me,” Meguid said. “Every year he reprints my books, but says they’re still in the first printing. The American University in Cairo makes translations into English, but it has bad distribution.”
“I’m sorry. I admire your work and hope you have better luck with it.”
This elicited a chuckle. “You know what Hemingway said? He said, ‘If I was born in Africa, I would not be Hemingway.’ He had a big powerful country behind him. It’s hard when you don’t have that. It’s hard when you write in Arabic. But we go on, don’t we?”
He signed my copy of No One Sleeps in Alexandria and urged me to send him copies of my books. “I can’t buy them, I don’t have the money.”
The Cecil Hotel boasted a Chinese restaurant on its roof, but I had no appetite for anything quite so exotic as Alexandrine-Cantonese cuisine. I wanted ... not home cooking, but something vaguely familiar. I asked the concierge about the Greek Club, which was reputed to have excellent mezzes and seafood and exhilarating views of the harbor. Since Greeks had once formed a sizable minority in the city-they had numbered almost one hundred thousand—I imagined some expats had lingered on, congregating each night at the Club for ouzo, rembetike music and nostalgic conversation.
But the concierge discouraged me. He claimed the Greek Club was far away and overcrowded. “You’ll need a reservation and a taxi.”
“I thought it was on the Corniche.”
“Yes, but at the end, near the fort. You shouldn’t walk. After dark, the streets aren’t safe. I’ll call and book a table, and reserve a taxi to take you and bring you back.”
The price he quoted, fifty Egyptian pounds, about $ 10, was a princely sum in a country where half the population earned less than $2 a day. It occurred to me that the concierge might be hustling for his cab-driving brother. Still, I figured it was worth ten bucks not to get lost or mugged.
The taxi proved to be a rattletrap Lada left over from the ’60s, when the Russians made common cause with their Pan-Arabic socialist brothers and bestowed battalions of technical and military advisers on Egypt. A hole in the Lada’s floor allowed me to look down at the racing Corniche. It also allowed toxic gusts of carbon monoxide into the car. Coughing and spluttering, I groped for the window. The handle was missing. The driver noticed my distress and dug a window roller from the glove compartment and handed it back to me.
While I hung my head out for air, he bombed along as if in a demolition derby. Only when he spotted a traffic cop did he slow down and loosely drape the seat belt across his shoulder. For a couple of blocks we crept along at twenty mph. Then he discarded the belt and stomped on the gas. Nothing I said could slow him again. Cyclists, pedestrians, horse cart drivers all panicked as he zipped past. Even other cabbies were alarmed.
We barreled on through Anfushi, a poor neighborhood that Durrell had described as a nest of streets with a “tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each other’s mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks.”
A hammer-headed peninsula separated the eastern harbor from the western harbor, and at its point where the lighthouse once stood, Fort Qait Bey looked like a freshly baked pastry topped with towers of meringue. There the cabbie had no choice but to stop.
“Greek Club,” he declared.
“Where?”
He indicated a dilapidated building. “Upstairs,” he said. “I wait here.”
“Don’t bother.” Head swimming with exhaust fumes, I paid him in full and sent him off, figuring I’d rather risk walking than asphyxiation.
Nothing identified the building—no number, no sign. Through an open door, a room was visible, along with several men who lounged on folding chairs, fingering worry beads, mesmerized by a television. Wearing striped galabiyyas, long, loose robes, they might have been in pajamas, settling down for the night. Much as I hated to invade their
