Peace Kills (12 page)

The upthrustings and downtearings in central Cairo's business district look the way they do in every busy place. Or they would if you could see them behind the profusion of blimp-sized billboards that look the way they do in every busy place. As it turns out, the Nile
is
just a river in Egypt—not nearly as wide as the Hudson River at the George Washington Bridge. Cairo's rich have river views and live, as most rich do nowadays, in apartment houses of faceless effrontery. The only apparent difference from the apartments of the American rich with river views is that in the Cairo apartments every single room has a huge chandelier.

But the emblematic building of Cairo is the small tower block—five or six stories designed in a fashion so functional that the Bauhaus architects were lapdogs of ornamentalism by comparison. Slab floors are supported by reinforced-concrete posts and beams, like the skeletons of timber-frame colonial farmhouses—and, like colonial farmhouses, the tower blocks tend sometimes to the rhomboid. The spaces between the posts are filled with jumbles of approximately brick-shaped bricks and punctuated, apparently at random,
with little windows and balconies. The outside edges of poured-concrete staircases poke through the masonry, their runs and risers making zigzag patterns. Dried oozes of mortar cling to the brickwork. Water pipes and electric wires are tacked onto the outside walls as if in halfhearted, rust-staining homage to the Pompidou Center.

In Europe these myriad domiciles would look like self-storage units for the urban proletariat. In Egypt, concrete mosques are crammed between the tenements and festooned with colored lights—as if for Christmas decoration, except no red, just the green of Islam. Commerce hums on the ground floors in shops and restaurants, one called Pizza Hat. Roofs are adorned with the festive dishware of satellite TV. The walls of the little balconies are plastered and painted blindingly cheerful shades of swimming-pool blue and lawn-chemical green.

“Plain exteriors,” said Peter, “mean less taxes to the government. Interiors are very often elaborate.” And peering into bright living rooms, I could see another emblematic Cairo item—the astonishingly ugly sofa. An ideal Egyptian davenport has two Fontainebleaus' (the one in France and the one in Miami) worth of carving and gilt and is upholstered in plush, petit point, plaid, and paisley as if Donald Trump and Madame Pompadour and Queen Victoria and the Doors had gotten together to start a decorating firm. Often there's a pair of matching chairs.

You see the astonishingly ugly sofa everywhere—in the homes of the well-off and the otherwise, in hotel lobbies, office reception areas, furniture-store windows (of course), and, most spectacularly, on Egyptian television sitcom sets. One actor sits down on it and makes an exasperated face while
the other actors gesticulate comically. I couldn't understand what was going on in Egyptian sitcoms, but I could tell it was more charming than Montel Williams.

I got to watch a lot of Egyptian TV, owing to a miscalculation in my attempt at cultural understanding. I'd arrived in Egypt in early December, in the middle of Ramadan. Not that Ramadan itself is hard to understand. It's a kind of Lent or extended Yom Kippur, with fasting from sunrise to sunset. Nothing is supposed to pass the lips, not even a smoke or a sip of water. And Egyptians, at least in public, observe the rules. Clubs and discos are closed. Coffeehouses are empty. People in airport lounges are reading the Koran aloud. I was changing money when the call to midday prayer came from the PA system of the local mosque. The bank guard put his rifle aside, unrolled a rug, and performed his devotions. Fortunately, bank robbers were as pious and made no depredations. But Ramadan also has the aspect of a monthlong Thanksgiving dinner with the family. When the sun goes down, everyone rushes home for the
iftar
feast. Another big meal,
suhour
, is served before dawn. There's a bit of Christmas, too, with shopping for toys and clothes to be given to children during the three days of
Eid al-fitr
, when the fasting is over. Stores are open at all hours of the night, and folks are out in the streets at three and four in the morning, children in tow. I'd been in Egypt for a week before I realized I was a diurnal creature in a nocturnal biosystem.

During the hours of daylight, Egyptians are—considering that they're hungry, thirsty, and really want a cigarette—remarkably cheerful. That is, when they're awake. People
sleep late. Arriving in Egypt during Ramadan is like arriving in an American small town on a holiday weekend about the time that the bowl games come on. Ramadan is, in fact, Egypt's peak television-viewing period. “Best TV Land is in Ramadan,” I heard an announcer say as I surfed past what might have been an Arabic version of
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
. The celebrity guests were sitting on an astonishingly ugly sofa.

The effusive, jolly ugliness of furniture suits a city that should be depressing but isn't. And the city should be squalid, too. It's an impoverished metropolis with a population density three times New York's. But Cairo is clean—if you don't count a sky that ranges in color from cheap-motel bedsheet to frightening diaper.

There's little begging, although plenty of
Whereyoufrom Youbuypostcardokay?
if you look like a tourist, and I do. Nobody is living on the street. The homeless, Peter explained, have teamed up with the lifeless. The city's huge Eastern and Southern Cemeteries are filled with house-sized mausoleums used as houses. The Egyptian government, surrendering to the perennial Cairo housing shortage, has provided the cemeteries with a modicum of water and electricity—a humane version of American big cities' just giving up and getting Target to provide the homeless with snappy Michael Graves-designed trash bags to sleep under.

According to Peter, there are postmortem sublets in the so-called City of the Dead. The tenant of record's heirs charge rent to the viable occupants, who have to make themselves scarce on holidays and special occasions, when bereaved families come to picnic or even spend the night with the
deceased. Peter said there have been squatters among the tombs since the fourteenth century. But the taste for elaborate mausoleums goes back further in Egypt—and so, maybe, do the squats. Perhaps disaffected experimental colossus carvers, young barley-beer addicts, and aspiring scribes with papyrus sheets full of edgy new hieroglyphics had crash pads in the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

Peter and I went ten miles south to Memphis, the capital of Egypt during most of pharaonic times. For three and a half millennia Memphis was the most important city in the country. Then, in the tenth century, the Fatimid general Jauhar al Rumi pillaged its stones to build Cairo. The dikes were neglected. And now Memphis is gone beneath the silt of the Nile.

But the former capital's necropolis, Saqqara, survives, marked by the Step Pyramid of Djoser. The Step Pyramid was completed about 2635
B.C
. Peter said, “This was the world's first stone building.”

I said, “In a country that's nothing but stone, with not a tree for miles, surely somebody …”

“The ancient Egyptians,” Peter said, “built their houses out of mud and their tombs out of stone—to last for eternity.” Most of Saqqara has collapsed into rubble.

Nearby is the Bent Pyramid. “This was the first pyramid of the true smooth-sided type,” Peter said. To me it looked like a monument to middle-aged adultery—an affair begun with an aggressive angle of attack that couldn't be maintained. Apparently, building a pyramid was less straightforwardly Herculean than one might think. Peter explained, though not
in these words, that there was more to it than making the top pointy so that the ancient Egyptians would know when to stop. Peter said the craft of pyramid building required a hundred years to perfect, leaving five pharaohs under large but irregular piles of stuff.

We went into the tomb of Mereruka, son-in-law of Pharaoh Teti, who reigned from 2355 to 2343
B.C
. This tomb was a mastaba, a flat-roofed stone building, with thirty-three rooms. Peter claimed that only royals were allowed to depict the gods in their burial chambers, so Mereruka decorated his with scenes from daily life. And what a life. Carved onto the walls is a nice-looking family with plenty of household help. Frequent gourmet meals are served. There's surround-sound lute playing, many buff dancing girls, and goldsmiths coming up with something to placate the missus. Packs of happy naked kids—it must have been a progressive day-care center—play tug-of-war and Johnny-on-the-pony. Travel is as adventurous as anything in an Abercrombie & Kent brochure. Mereruka is shown spearing hippos (probably the bungee-jumping of his day). And one whole wall is devoted to a lively illustration of revenue enhancement. Serf personnel are—to put it in Enron terms—allowing their 401(k)s to be used to purchase the corporation's own stock (at the urging of supervisors with sticks).

Mereruka did well for himself while his wife's dad was running the show. I was looking at a recognizable yuppie paradise. Nothing here would have been strange to the Reagan merger-and-acquisition years or the dot-com boom. All it lacked was golf.

And yet I was also looking at thirty-three rooms of tomb, every one of which was to be filled with custom-made
furniture, precious jewels, designer-label kilts and sandals, supermodel-endorsed eye kohl, vintage grand-cru palm-sap wine, and enough meals-to-go to last forever, not to mention archaeological treasures and priceless items of ancient Egyptian art. Plus there was that mummification, which probably cost more than a year at a spa.

Mereruka had invested the proceeds of his peak earning years in worm's meat. I was standing in his Aspen ski lodge, his Hamptons beach house, his Gulfstream jet, the professional sports team he never owned, the college education of his kids. (And in the end, Mereruka's tomb was never finished. Teti's successor, Pepy I, may have been one of those churlish brothers-in-law determined to get the deadwood out of the family business.)

There's a temptation to think that understating an ancient culture is easier, or at least less hectic, than understanding its contemporary offspring. The ancient culture holds still for inspection and doesn't produce new, confusing events such as a fresh episode of
Survivor
just after three thousand people were voted off the island of Manhattan.

But giant burial vaults can't have been an economically efficient investment of surplus capital. Riches could have been channeled into more productive use. Channeled literally, as in digging a canal across the flatland between the Nile Delta and the Gulf of Suez. But none was dug until after Darius, the Persian emperor, had conquered Egypt, in the sixth century
B.C
. Instead, when pharaohs wanted to trade along the Red Sea coast, they dismantled their boats, hauled them through the eastern desert, and put them back together. The Egyptians did not smelt iron. They didn't even discover bronze until the Middle Kingdom, a thousand years
after the civilization was founded. Irrigation was accomplished with buckets on the ends of long levers or by carrying pots slung from yokes. The waterwheel wasn't introduced until the Persian invasion. And before the Persians there wasn't such a thing as money. The ancient Egyptian technological innovation of note (besides the enormous triangular four-sided sepulcher stack) was papyrus paper. According to the Egyptologist Cyril Aldred, the ready availability of paper “made the highly organized Egyptian state possible,” for the privilege of living in which the Egyptian peasantry paid 50 percent of its produce in taxes.

Even so, I felt that I emerged from Mereruka's tomb into a poorer, more woebegone country. Of course, I didn't. Egypt today has a per capita gross domestic product of $3,600. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that before the Industrial Revolution, world per capita GDP was about $650 (in 1990 dollars). In 1820 Great Britain was the richest country on earth, with a per capita GDP of only $1,756. In wealth-per-person terms, merrie olde England was a Ghana. The ancient world seems rich to us because its DVDs of
Sex and the City
have survived rather than its kinescopes of
The Honeymooners
. And disparities in income, so shocking to our contemporary sensibilities, can't have been less. Consider the negative net worth of the slaves. They didn't have a title to, or even a mortgage on, themselves.

That said, in the fields and palm groves along the Nile are low mud houses of a kind unchanged since the days of Teti and Pepy. Identical homes are on display in miniature at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo—part of the LEGOLAND of peasantry and servitude that was placed as an offering in a pharaoh's crypt.

These Nile-side domiciles, in contrast to the City of the Dead, have been supplied with few electrical wires. Running water has in fact been taken away. Nile floods are now contained by the Aswan High Dam, and Egypt's fellaheen must use commercial fertilizer to do the job that muck did for eons.

So the farmers by the millions move to Cairo, and between the remaining baked-earth homesteads rise the weekend villas of plutocrat Cairenes. The villas would do credit to any gated community in Boca Raton. But the villas are the product of a path to success unfamiliar to Boca (if not to Mereruka). “Who can afford these places?” I asked Peter, who has a Ph.D. in Egyptology, as does his wife. They struggle to support two kids.

“Officials,” he said. “And belly dancers.”

Other paths to success are steeper. Peter took me to one of the numerous “carpet schools” along the Memphis-Giza road. Here children age ten and up were engaged in—pedagogical alibis and apprenticeship hooey aside—child labor. Also, some of the children looked more like eight than ten.

There was nothing Dickensian about the well-lit, swept, and airy ground floor full of looms. The manager said that the boys and girls were paid “to give them encouragement” and that “maybe they'll be able to get a job in the company's factory,” although I had a feeling this
was
the factory. He assured me that his charges received academic instruction similar to that in the government schools. And maybe they do. Scribbled on one weaving frame was graffiti in English that read, “I will always be looling you.” I watched little-kid fingers move with blurring speed among warp and woof and
saw little-kid faces puckered in grim expertise. I'll never buy a handmade rug again.