The Wet and the Dry (25 page)

The café’s plasma screens show American wrestling shows, keenly enjoyed as far as I can see by the same scarfed matrons whose disapproval does not extend to large men in bikini bottoms. I can drink Lipton with sugar and smoke for hours, and Stella is served without much discretion. When I ask about this, a neighbor tells me that Egyptians do not really regard beer as sinful alcohol. “After all,” he says, “we invented it. We cannot ban what we invented.”

It is probably true. Go to the Egyptian Museum, and in the room devoted to the funerary models rescued from the tomb of Meket-Re, a high official of the Middle Kingdom at Thebes, you see miniature reproductions of various workshops. Among them is a brewery, with seven little men thrusting their hands into beer fermentation jars. These perfectly preserved models of ships, workshops, and villa gardens filled with exquisitely painted fig trees are thought to embody things that the dead man valued in life and that he wanted to take with him into the afterlife. Four thousand years ago Meket-Re wanted his beer in the afterlife. In one model ship he is shown reclining in the shade of a bull hide smelling a lotus flower and listening to a minstrel.

When darkness comes, I will go to the Meame and sit at a table in a dark corner and watch a girl dance on the stage, then wander down to the tables with an insolence that is not quite lechery. The men delirious but seated, the girls there not to provide sex but to induce drinking.

Alternatively, there is a short walk to the Amira on Talaat Harb, a drinking club consisting of four rooms each with live music. It is much the same atmosphere. The music is deafening;
the men occasionally dance with the girls. The darkness almost total, and the withdrawal from the new puritanism of the country almost complete. How much one goes to bars just to escape what others laboriously refer to as
real life
. But what if that life is neither especially real nor even especially congenial? What if the society begins to close down, to narrow?

In downtown one can keep moving from
baladi
to
baladi
, because they have not yet been closed down, but you have to know where they are: using them requires a casual street knowledge that can be picked up only orally or through incessant trial and error. None of them are advertised. Most lie at the bottom of narrow unlit alleys and passageways, and no city is more a labyrinth than Cairo. Off 26th July, again, but closer to Tahrir Square, there is a strange place called the Nile Munchen, with its outdoor restaurant closed in on all sides by the backs of tenements and its ground-floor belly-dance bar. There is the touristy El-Hourreye, where the foreign journalists like to pose, and the seedier and more heartfelt Cap d’Or off Abd El-Khalik Tharwat, a den of dark varnished wood paneling and glaring light, where men pass between the all-male tables selling pistachios.

There is the splendid gloom of the Horris, a bar elevated above 26th July by a flight of steps and concealed behind anonymous glass doors, and the lofty hotel bar of the Odeon near Marouf, with its decayed oil paintings and terrible food and a terrace where sooty winds embrace the drinker.

I go one night to the Greek Club and find that it has closed. I go to the finely named Bussy Cat or to Estoril—a barman in a neat white turban—and hang about inside them like a fly
that cannot decide quite where to alight; then, with a sort of desperation born of indolence, I push on to other even grimmer holes: the Alf Leila wa Leila off El Gomhoreya, the excruciating Rivera, the Victoria Hotel, or the Hawaii on Mohammed Farid. A whole evening can be spent in this misanthropic pursuit, wandering from places like Stella Bar to Carol and on to the Bar Simon or the Gemaica. But as often as not, I will come back to the calm sanity of the Cap d’Or, a bar that is not signposted and that is entered through a side door, where one can sit unmolested for hours without music or harassment, doing what one does in a bar: contemplate death and the inconsequential things that come just before it.

I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily
ful
, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men disheveled and worn-down looking, in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.

As the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power in this traumatized republic, as the women—unimaginable two years ago—wear headscarves in the streets almost uniformly and the beards of the devout multiply, the Cairo drinker wonders how long it will be before the Scarabee Alley becomes a
thing of the past. It will not happen overnight. But it is the slow, gradual changes that are the most irreversible.

That winter I was in Cairo to meet two Lebanese winemakers named Labib Kallas and André Hajj-Thomas. These two willing exiles are the bright minds behind the only winery in Egypt that grows its own grapes in the country: EgyBev.

Their company has a headquarters in the formerly affluent suburb of Heliopolis close to the airport and a winery located in the Red Sea party town of Hurghada, several hundred miles south of Cairo and roughly parallel to Luxor. Their vineyards, meanwhile, have been reclaimed from the desert land in the delta some thirty miles north of the capital, in an area that has been growing wine grapes for thousands of years—perhaps longer than anywhere on earth. In the delta once lay the vineyards of ancient Egypt. They have long disappeared, as have most of the modern vineyards established by the Greek winemaker Nestor Gianaclis a hundred years ago. Gianaclis still exists as a winery, but it is now, like most alcohol production in Egypt, owned by Heineken International. Its vineyards still operate in the same delta area as those of Labib Kallas, but Heineken imports most of its grapes for its Egyptian wines from South Africa and Lebanon. Labib, by his own reckoning, has set out to create the only range of authentic, biodynamic, and truly indigenous wines in Egypt. They are Shahrazade, Jardin du Nil, Beausoleil. His vineyards are planted with the usual international varieties, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Viognier, and Chardonnay
(from which he makes the only sparkling wine in North Africa, Le Baron). But he also makes a white wine, Beausoleil, from a uniquely Egyptian grape called Bannati. It’s the only Bannati wine in the world.

Labib and André are the kind of worldly, hedonistic middle-aged Lebanese who could only have been produced by a city like Beirut. They are Christians. Most of the inner staff at their company are also Christians. The workers in the vineyards, however, are Muslims, and some are even Salafi. They are not told that the grapes they are tending are meant for the production of wine. They are told they are table grapes.

As it is, many Muslim suppliers—bottlers, label makers—have told the company that their money is no longer
halal
. In the new climate of Egypt, even a label maker does not want to be associated with a winery.

We drove up on the desolate Alexandria Desert Road, which must once have been beautiful. Now it is semi-industrial, the flatlands crowded by sprawling housing developments for the affluent classes of Cairo. In recent years the city has become so unbearable, so unlivable, that those who can are building condos miles out in the desert just, as Labib puts it, “to breathe.” Yet the revolution has caused this construction frenzy to pause. Around the vast vineyards that Labib and André have created over the last ten years—they are the largest single biodynamic vineyard in the world—the rows of boxlike units stand waiting for the resumption of national prosperity. It may never come.

We walked across the vineyards in cool winter sun. Vines to the horizon in every direction. The two men stopped here and
there to watch the workers pruning, intervening to correct their technique. The intricate technical details of viticulture are so alien here that they have to be supervised with constant attention. The two men sometimes sleep out in the vineyards in order to do it around the clock, and over time the field hands have adapted to these peculiar demands. Yet over this whole enterprise, with its initial investment of $2 million, there hangs the inevitable uncertainty of making an alcoholic product in a country that is retreating from its secular inheritance.

André, who is now in his sixties and therefore somewhat older than Labib, lived through the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. He has the tough weariness and joie de vivre that such experiences generate. As we strolled down a long line of Chardonnay stock, he bent down and kept picking up the sandy, slightly stony soil and filtering it through his fingers.

“I give this country another five years, and then we’ll be gone. It seems quite clear to me that the Muslim Brotherhood, or even the Salafis, who are much more extreme, will come to shape the whole culture in their image. This country is 50 percent illiterate. Half the population cannot believe that a good Muslim political candidate could in any way be a bad man. They will vote for him if the imam tells them to.”

Egyptians, he went on, do not think of beer as truly alcoholic. They make an exception for it and do not tax it highly. It is the national beverage, and it will probably remain so. But wine is heavily taxed, and it is not seen so favorably. Like hard liquor, it is seen as alien and European and inherently sinful. Moreover, it possesses little of the inherent allure of whisky and vodka.
The prevalence of drink in Nasser’s Egypt centered on the usual beverages of the newly decolonized world. It is a colonial inheritance, as it is everywhere, and one that has until now not been repudiated. For until now almost nothing of the colonial inheritance has been repudiated except its abstract ideas about race. For all the rhetoric that liberation created, the whisky and soda remain alongside the electricity grids, the roads, and the airports. Only Islam has begun to roll back that tide, and it, too, will keep most of the goodies but not the booze, the music, or the film.

The Egyptian Revolution, meanwhile, has not made Labib and André optimistic. There is no institutional core to the society and none can be created out of nothing, and certainly not overnight. It is a vacuum, it has been a vacuum for half a century. Into the original vacuum of the Revolution of 1952 the army moved, as always happens. They have run the country ever since. Egypt has decayed decade by decade. Forty million illiterates, and a city that is fragmenting, falling into pieces. Into dust and ruin.

I asked them out of curiosity whether Cairo could be rebuilt as Beirut has been, by the construction company Solidere, after the Lebanese civil war. They shrugged. The civil war in Lebanon destroyed Beirut. The historic city all but vanished. To rebuild it as Solidere has done, with shining skyscrapers created by the company’s total territorial control of the city center, was possible there. Cairo is the opposite. It is decaying, but it has not been destroyed. Its decay will therefore go on forever. It is entropy, not reinvention. Egyptians, if you want to look on
the bright side, are not the kind to slaughter one another over differences.

“But in the meantime,” Labib concluded, as we walked around piles of his homemade biodynamic compost, “we are the only genuine wine left in Egypt. Yet we could not get a permit from the local Giza authorities to put our winery next to our vineyards. It has to be four hundred miles away!”

Nevertheless, it’s only a one-hour flight to Hurghada. The next day we were there, driving from the beach town to the far more exclusive resort development of El Gouna, half an hour north on the coast. It is there that the Lebanese wine men both live and work—the winery is next door to the Arabian-themed adobe faux-village built around a marina. They have bought condos in the Arabian complexes, between which cobbled alleys attempt to evoke the narrow streets of a meticulously restored medina in the Gulf.

The style here is very Dubai. Shops, restaurants, clubs, nautical equipment stores, antique outlets all merge into an ethnic mall executed in apparently local materials and quietly furnished with Wi-Fi. El Gouna is a gated community where everything has been built from scratch. For the Cairene rich, it is a desirable fantasy, an escape into efficiency and dustlessness. Here the gilded young come on their EgyptAir charters, dressed in Dutti and Burberry and chattering in the new language of Arabenglish. The marina is filled with luxury yachts registered in ports all over the world. Alcohol flows freely in every outlet.

El Gouna is one of those representations of the West, one of its outposts in a far-flung corner of an Islamic desert landscape, that continue to nourish an idea of a secular civilization that is otherwise perceived as dying by the very people who are seduced by it. The culture of the drinkers, of the free people who can do as they please, is the same culture whose maternity wards are empty, whose public finances are in a death spiral, and whose self-absorbed banalities no longer enchant those who were once their most avid admirers.

We visited the winery during the day. It is a state-of-the-art place, similar in every way to comparable wineries in the West. Here we sat among the steel fermentation tanks and drank through vertical tastings of their offerings, including the low-end Moon Reef, sold as an “all inclusive” wine in Egypt’s Club Med resorts, and the Le Baron rosé
méthode champenoise
.

Labib described taking his wines to an international trade fair in Montpellier. Medals, praise, bafflement were the result: an Egyptian wine is not an easy sell. Egyptians themselves are glumly skeptical. They refer to their homegrown wines as Château Panadol. The very idea is tenuous, fragile. Labib even makes a pretty good grappa, but Egyptians will not drink it. Their arak is their best bet.

But even arak is not the national drink of Egypt. Beer is. At night, however, seated in the marina restaurants with their resolute American food, we drank the Jardin du Nil reds and the elegant white Bannati Beausoleil, and the two men mused that an eventual return to Lebanon was all but inevitable. But what about a displacement to the West? I asked.