The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (23 page)

I came to Weeki Wachee to sound the mystery of the mermaid, to find danger and sex and darkness and maybe hear my own deeps echoed back. Instead I found a polite performance and excellent work ethic and real people who do what they do out of sisterhood and love for the cold springs. This is what happens when you are given a plateful of hot Americana à  la mode and expect to taste profundity; my disappointment was a result of my failure of expectations, not their show. I'd brought a bathing suit, but it sat dry at the bottom of my purse. I think I'd hoped the mermaids would recognize me as one of their own and invite me in for a swim. Oh well. I did spend a day looking at beautiful women, a spectacular way to pass the time.

As I drove back to Gainesville, I thought of the Rhinemaidens. The freshwater Weeki Wachee mermaids are closer to nixies than actual mermaids, who supposedly live in the ocean; the saltwater Gulf, the
mer
of the maids, is miles away from the springs. In Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, the Rhinemaidens are nixies of the River Rhine and keepers of the gold that, when seized, leads to world power. They're seductive and morally ambiguous and elusive and playful. The gold is stolen from them in the first opera of the three, and at one point later they sing angrily:

Traulich und treu

ist's nur in der Tiefe:

falsch und feig

ist, was dort oben sich freut!

According to my dictionary and my shaky memory of college German, this means: Only the deeps hold intimacy and truth; false and cowardly is the surface's rejoicing.

But the surface is often beautiful; it is often good enough. I drove home in silence, letting my brain decompress. Two weeks later, I'd spend a week at Crescent Beach on the Atlantic coast of Florida, where high-school students rent condos and pack them with dozens of hormonal bodies. I'd watch these teenage girls in their bikinis braving the cold March wind, perhaps—probably—drunk in the middle of the day, delighting in their new, gorgeous, dangerous bodies, flirting with the boys who eyed them with shielded delight, and I'd think,
Aha.
Here
be sirens
. But on the drive home from Weeki Wachee, the long brown fields were tender in the early-afternoon light. The blue sky appeared out of the tunnels of water oak and palmetto scrub, the air calm and cool in these last months before the heat descends like a solid fabric. I cracked the window to let in the wind. The daughters of the air were doing one good deed to earn their souls that afternoon. Sometimes it's lovely to float on the surface of things.

PETER HESSLER

FROM
The New Yorker

I
N CAIRO
, my family lives on the ground floor of an old building, in a sprawling, high-ceilinged apartment with three doors to the outside. One door opens onto the building's lobby, another leads to a small garden, and the third is solely for the use of the
zabal
, or garbageman, who is named Sayyid Ahmed. It's in the kitchen, and when we first moved to the apartment, at the beginning of 2012, the landlady told me to deposit my trash on the fire escape outside the door at any time. There was no pickup schedule, and no preferred container; I could use bags or boxes, or I could simply toss loose garbage outside. Sayyid's services had no set fee. He wasn't a government employee, and he had no contract or formal job. I was instructed to pay him whatever I believed to be fair, and if I pleased I could pay him nothing at all.

Many things in Egypt don't work very well. Traffic is bad, and trains get canceled; during the summer, it's not unusual to have five electricity blackouts in a single day. One year, we couldn't buy bottled water for months, because the plant that produced the water somehow caught fire. Since we moved into the apartment, the country has cycled through three constitutions, three presidents, four prime ministers, and more than 700 members of parliament. But there hasn't been a single day when the trash wasn't cleared outside my kitchen door. As a whole, Cairo's waste-collection system is surprisingly functional, considering that it's largely informal. In a sprawling, chaotic city of more than 17 million,
zabaleen
like Sayyid have managed to develop one of the most efficient municipal recycling networks in the world.

At first, I never saw Sayyid working, because he cleared my fire escape before dawn. After three months of this invisible service, he approached me one day on the street and asked if I had previously lived in China. I wasn't sure how he knew this—we had chatted a few times, but never for long. He said that he had an important question about Chinese medicine.

That evening, he arrived at eight o'clock sharp, dressed in his work clothes. He's not much taller than 5 feet, but his shoulders are broad and his legs are bowed from hauling weight. Usually his clothes are several sizes too large, and his shoes flap like those of a clown, because he harvests them from the garbage of bigger men. At my apartment, he produced a small red box decorated with gold calligraphy. The Chinese labeling was elegant but evasive: the pills were described as “health protection products” that “promoted development and power.” Inside the box, a sheet of instructions reminded me how sometimes the Chinese can be much more expressive when they use English badly:

2 pills at a time whenever nece necessary

Before fucking make love 20minutes

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“In the trash,” Sayyid said. “From a man who died.” He told me that the man was elderly, and had lived down the street. After his death, his sons threw away the pills and other possessions. “Many of these things were
mish kuaissa
,” Sayyid said. “Not good.”

I asked what he meant by that.

“Things like this”: he sketched with a finger in the air, and then he pointed below his belt. “It's electric. It uses batteries. It's for women. This kind of thing isn't good.” But talking about it seemed to make Sayyid happy. He told me that the trash had also contained Egyptian sex pills and a large collection of pornographic magazines. He didn't say what he had done with those things. I asked where the dead man used to work.

“He was an ambassador.”

I had been studying Arabic for less than a year, and Sayyid's tone was so matter-of-fact that I asked him to repeat this. “He was in embassies overseas,” Sayyid explained. “He was very rich; he had millions of dollars. He had four million and forty-four dollars in his bank account.”

The precision of this figure caught my attention, and I asked Sayyid how he knew.

“Because it was on letters from the bank.”

I made a mental note to be careful about what I threw away. Sayyid asked for details about the Chinese medicine, and I did my best to translate the part about waiting 20 minutes before fucking make love. He was vague about what he intended to do with the drugs. I checked the ingredients—white ginseng, deer antler—and decided that there probably wasn't any risk. I had a feeling that it wouldn't be the first time he'd taken a pill out of the garbage.

After that, Sayyid began stopping by regularly with questions. Over time, I realized that there are a number of people he's recruited as informal consultants. He's illiterate, like more than a quarter of adult Egyptians, so if he wants to read something that he pulls from the trash he goes to the proprietor of H Freedom, a small corner kiosk. If he finds himself involved in a neighborhood dispute, he calls on the man who distributes government-subsidized bread. My own field of expertise ranges from foreign things to sex products and alcohol. If somebody throws away a half-finished bottle, Sayyid checks with me to see if it's imported and thus might have resale value. He's Muslim, but not particularly devout; when he stops by at night, he often asks for a beer. He's the only guest I've ever had who carries away his empties, because he knows he'll end up collecting them anyway.

In part because he can't read, he's skilled at picking up on subtle clues. He hand-sorts all the garbage, and at one point he noticed that foreign women often throw away empty packs of pills whose number corresponds to the days of the month. Sayyid concluded that they were an aphrodisiac, and he asked me if they have the effect of making foreign women desire sex on a daily basis. I explained that this isn't exactly correct, although the assumption was understandable, because Sayyid finds a large number of sex drugs and paraphernalia in the trash. A couple of times, he's brought by other forms of Chinese sex medicine, and he shows up with drugs that have names like Virecta. Anything blue catches his eye—recently he appeared with a half-finished foil pack of Aerius, which excited him until I went online and learned that it's an allergy medication that happens to be the same color as Viagra.

I live on Zamalek, the northern part of an island in the Nile that's situated in central Cairo, and Sayyid has become my most reliable guide to the neighborhood. Occasionally I accompany him on his predawn rounds. The first time I did this, in February of 2013, he led me to the top landing of the fire escape of a building on my street.

“This is Madame Heba,” he said, grabbing a black plastic garbage bag and tossing it into a huge canvas basket perched atop his back, Quasimodo style. He descended while engaging in a running commentary about residents, whose names I've changed. “This is Dr. Mohammed,” he said at the next landing, and then he climbed down another level. “This one's a priest, Father Mikael. He's very cheap. He gives me only five pounds a month.” He heaved two big bags. “He says he doesn't have any money, but I see all the boxes and bags from the gifts that he gets. People give him things all the time, because he's a priest.”

On a different floor, we picked our way across a landing covered with rotting food; a pile of trash bags had been ripped apart by stray cats. “This one's a foreigner,” Sayyid explained. “I'm not supposed to touch her garbage. The landlord isn't happy with her; there's some kind of fight. He told me not to remove her trash.” Sayyid said that this isn't unusual: people can tip him to remove trash, but they can also tip him to allow somebody else's garbage to accumulate. We descended to the next floor, where he remarked that the resident was a Muslim with a drinking problem. “There are always bottles in her trash,” he said in a low voice. By way of illustration, he ripped open the bag on her doorstep and showed me the empties: Auld Stag whiskey and Casper wine. He did the same thing with a bag at a building across the street. “This is Mr. Hassan,” he said. “He's sick.” Sayyid tore open the plastic, rooted around inside, and pulled out a pair of used syringes. “I think he has diabetes,” he said. “Every day there are two syringes in the garbage. He takes one in the morning and one at night.”

Sayyid's route twisted through a maze of fire escapes that climbed through narrow, chimneylike atria. Periodically a stairway led to the roof of a building, where the gray streak of the Nile was visible two blocks away. Zamalek is a relatively prosperous part of Cairo, and it has always attracted foreign residents, but there are also many middle-class and even poor people, because rent-control laws keep the price of some apartments as low as a few dollars a month. As a result, landlords rarely make improvements, and old buildings have a kind of fading glory. On my street, many structures were built in the art deco style, with marble lobbies and beautifully patterned wrought-iron grillwork along the balconies. It's common for apartments to have a kitchen door that leads to the fire escape, like mine.

Sometimes an early riser will hear Sayyid working, and she'll open the kitchen door to greet him and offer a cup of tea. One morning I was with Sayyid when an elderly woman handed him four hamburger patties that she had carefully prepared in a plastic bag for his lunch. In Cairo, where many basic services have developed informally, and where there's a strong culture of tipping, people tend to be generous when somebody is working hard. This is one reason that Sayyid dresses so poorly—he knows that dirty, ill-fitting clothes are more likely to inspire generosity.

And the information that he gathers from the trash helps him interact with residents. In addition to the door-to-door collection, he sorts garbage in the street, collecting it into piles that are hauled away by trucks. He greets everybody who passes, asking about spouses and children, and he's particularly attentive to details of health. On his early-morning rounds, he comments on whether a resident is receiving injections, or taking medicine, or wearing diapers. If something seems particularly interesting, he'll open the bag for my benefit. Once Sayyid stopped at a landing and whispered that the resident was a sex-crazed Lebanese man. Then he ripped open the trash, found a discarded bottle, and asked me to read the label: “Durex Play Feel Intimate Lube.”

Sayyid's conversations revolve around the three fundamental forces in his world, which are women, money, and garbage. Often these things are closely connected. In the beginning, it was Sayyid's father's unquenchable passion for women that led to his son becoming a
zabal
. Sayyid's father worked as a watchman on the outskirts of Cairo, where he embarked on a rapid series of marriages and divorces. All told, he went through nine wives, or ten if you count the Christian woman he married briefly before Sayyid's mother. Nobody seems to know how many children he fathered, but it was too many to support, and he died when Sayyid was six. As a boy, Sayyid never attended a single day of school, and by the age of 11 he was working full-time as an assistant to
zabaleen
.

Despite this difficult childhood, Sayyid speaks fondly of his parents. And in his ancestral village in Upper Egypt residents remember his father in almost mythical terms. They say that at heart he was a true Arab, a Bedouin, a man of the Sahara; and thus he was fated to restlessness. The villagers also make it clear that they don't count the Christian wife.