fellow cocked his thumb toward some stairs. I started climbing, though I had little faith that I’d find food. But then on the third floor, the walls brightened with murals of islands and blue skies and whitewashed villages, and I arrived at a reasonable facsimile of a Greek taverna. Not a lively establishment-there were very few customers and none who appeared to be Greek-but at least it was open for business.
I took a table on the terrace, caressed by a breeze. Lanterns necklaced the harbor, and painted boats floated like confetti. Through a long lens and in flattering light, this was the optimal view of Alexandria’s charms. I might have been gazing at an aging movie star filmed through gauze. I marveled, as I would many times in the next few months, at how, depending on the hour or the air density, the North African light changed and in the process altered your very understanding of light and how it could scramble a landscape and your head.
I ordered hummus, tahini, tabouli and grilled calamari, and washed it all down with cold Omar Khayyam white wine. Say what you will about the quality of Egyptian vintages, but the exotic labels—not just Omar Khayyam but Obelisk and Sheharazad—were wonderfully evocative. After a few sips, the day’s glum start was forgotten, and I veered toward full-blown, manic sentimentality. When the waiter brought a honeyed wedge of baklava for dessert and said that he loved America and would like to live there, I exclaimed, “But it’s so beautiful in Alexandria!”
This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. I suppose he was hoping for help with a visa.
Though well fed and fortified by Omar Khayyam, I left the restaurant feeling skittish. This wasn’t Baghdad or Beirut; it wasn’t even East London or Brooklyn. But it was Egypt at night, a Muslim city, and I was a white-haired, white-faced American walking the crowded streets alone.
From two previous trips to Egypt, I recalled hordes of hotel touts, scheming shopkeepers, anti-Israeli agitators and boys who professed to be students but offered their services as guides, pimps or sexual partners. But this night was blessedly free of that hands-on, full-court press. Nobody badgered me to buy. No one called out, “Hello, America,” or cursed me as a khawaga, a foreigner, or as a nasrani, a Christian.
Along the stone waterfront of the eastern harbor, boys played soccer under street lamps. On the seawall, young couples—girls in hijabs and boys in blue jeans—sat watching them. At the western harbor, whole families from infants to grandfathers luxuriated in the bracing April air. Cafés had set out tables where people drank tea and smoked hubbly-bubblies. A waiter invited me to have a seat, but nobody else noticed my presence. Kids whooshed by on scooters and bikes. Laughing teenagers dared one another to dart to the end of the quay where waves crashed over the jetty in a frigid spray. Middle-aged married folks lugged plastic chairs from the cafés out to protected coves and watched the stars.
Heading back toward the center of town, I walked on and on, telling myself I’d catch a cab at the first sign of trouble, the first time anyone got too friendly. Or too hostile. But block after block, I felt nothing from the crowd except benign indifference.
On the Corniche my late-night ramble turned into a contact sport, a kind of body surfing, as Egyptians flowed around me, into me, over me. To a claustrophobe, this might seem menacing, but I didn’t mind, and gradually the realization came to me that within the chaos of an Arab mob there was an intrinsic order, within the apparent irrationality there was a logic.
Still, I thought my good luck couldn’t last. If not in Egypt, then in Libya or Algeria, I’d be assailed on all sides by a boisterousness indistinguishable from mayhem or misdemeanor. There’d be murderous anti-Americanism, palpable danger, places I dared not go.
But for the moment I gloried in a feeling that American author Eleanor Clark best expressed when she wrote that Mediterranean streets constitute a great warm “withinness,” an inclusion that permits people to believe that to go out into a city is to go home.
The next day, I reviewed my notes for the lecture on travel, travel writing and travel literature that I had agreed to give at the American Center. Justin Siberell had read a similar paper I’d presented four years ago at a Modern Language Association meeting in New Orleans, and he assured me it was appropriate to the audience he expected in Alexandria. Typically, he said, such talks attracted a large turnout of Egyptians and a smattering of expats. Since there would be a simultaneous translation, his only warning was to speak slowly and distinctly so that the interpreter could keep pace.
Yet I felt a growing uneasiness, not so much premature stage fright as topic regret. In the context of Egypt and the Muslim world, in view of the life-and-death conflict within Arab countries, and between them and the West, it struck me as lightweight and elitist for an American to breeze into Alexandria and discuss his personal hobbyhorse. Okay, I could argue that travel is crucial to political and religious understanding. I could quote the eleventh-century Sufi Imam Qushayri, who declared that the objective of travel was “to discover inner ethical values.” I could cite Robert Byron, widely regarded as the best travel writer in English, who blamed the failure of British colonialism on “insufficient, or insufficiently imaginative, travel.” Still, I feared I’d sound like another self-indulgent foreigner larking around North Africa, another Orientalist presuming to lecture the natives.
Siberell swung by the Cecil to pick me up in a tanklike American SUV whose door shut with the solid thunk of a safe deposit box. It sounded armor-plated. A chauffeur steered us through the evening rush hour, and a powerful AC system screened out the heat, grit and smells of Alexandria. Yet Siberell seemed as tense as I was—and with much better reason. His assignment here was drawing to a close, and within days he would depart for Baghdad. He’d done a previous tour in the Green Zone. Now he was married and had kids, and he would be away from his family for a year.
“Shows you how smart I was to study Arabic,” he joked. It was a lament that I would hear from Foreign Service officers all across North Africa. Their hard-won fluency had sentenced them to the worst posting in the world. Sooner or later they would have to serve in Iraq, and while no American diplomat I met openly criticized the war, none defended it, either.
The American Center occupied the former private mansion of a wealthy Alexandrian family. In 1967, during the Six Day War, Egyptians had overrun and ransacked the building, and it had remained shut until Egypt and the United States resumed diplomatic relations, in 1974. Now it was surrounded by walls and wrought iron fences and flanked by armed guards. At the front gate, eyed by U.S. Marines, I stepped through a metal detector, traded my passport for a clip-on badge and crossed through a garden, following Siberell to a side entrance. There another squad of security guards scrutinized us.
From the American Center’s foyer we climbed a marble staircase to a loggia where locked doors of bulletproof Mylar lined the hall. Behind them, offices were accessible by computer code. Egyptians crouched on the carpet, as though begging for admission. They were reciting their evening prayers.
After they finished, we proceeded into a conference room where a crowd of seventy or so was divided between those in Western and Egyptian garb. But even men wearing suits and ties had prayer bumps on their foreheads, and all the women wore headscarves. One was in full niqab, staring out through slits. Lacy black gloves covered her hands and arms up to her elbows. Not a centimeter of her skin was visible. Beside her a man in a knit cap combed his fingers through a beard as broad as a broom.
Siberell introduced me in Arabic. The only words I understood were “Sharon Stone.” She had starred in a movie made from Year of the Gun, a novel I had written about terrorism in Italy. Mention of her name drew scattered laughs.
There were one or two American or European faces in the crowd, but I didn’t focus on them. As I spoke I tried to maintain friendly eye contact with the Egyptians, who listened through earphones.
