The Wet and the Dry (26 page)

No, that was now suddenly a little less appealing than it had
once been. The West was saturated, aging, overtaxed. It was not particularly enjoyable as a place. And they were Arabs. They wanted to be among the Arabs. They wanted to change the Arabs by refining their palates. Besides, making wine in Egypt was at least a novelty, it was an adventure. It was even possible that one day in the future, the Egyptian middle class would tire of endless strawberry juices and convert to wines made in their own delta. It depended on whether prosperity ever returned to the land.

“Did you see,” André said one night, “that member of the Egyptian parliament who began singing prayers in the middle of a parliamentary session? It’s gone viral on YouTube in Egypt. It’s almost a brawl. He won’t shut up, and the speaker has to shout him down. It was Mamdouh Ismail, a Salafist politician. This is the way it is going. They can’t even discuss normal things in the parliament without these lunatics bursting into prayer and disrupting everything. They would happily tear up all the vineyards we have planted, and they have said that they will.”

On the marina of El Gouna stands a renowned nightclub called Loca Loca. Its booming music can be heard all over the village, and through its windows we could see bodies writhing to rave music.

“There seems,” Labib said, “to be something in the Egyptian character that might prevent that happening. I might be wrong. They used to say the same thing about Iran.”

“But Iran’s history is not over,” I said. “Like Egypt, it is much older than Islam. Like Lebanon, for that matter.”

“It’s only Arabia that is not older than Islam, and even that
is actually. But here the awareness of ancient Egypt is so overwhelming. It will always be there.”

The beautiful little painted figures of beer makers of the Old Kingdom, with their supple breasts and hips: the brewers of Meket-Re are not the only ones in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

“Here,” he went on, “the drinking of something like beer was thousands of years old before Islam arrived. It had gone too deep. I don’t know if they drank beer in medieval Cairo, but I’d bet they did.”

“I think,” André put in, “that they drink beer in this country exactly as the ancients did. As a kind of surrogate water. It’s not ghettoized as alcohol.”

“It’s still the national drug.”

Regardless of the alcoholic habits of, say, the Fatimid period, I thought then of Kerényi and his claim for a possible Egyptian origin of beer and mead. The fermentations at the time of the reappearance of the Dog Star in July. The magical atmosphere of intoxication. If it had been drunk here for five thousand years, or even more, it could not be proscribed. It was strange, too, to think that mead was a staple drink of the English almost until modern times, but that today it is virtually the only alcoholic drink that cannot be obtained as a commercial product.
Meodu
, the Anglo-Saxons called it. The fermented timeless honey drink of the Nile.

Later, we went to Loca Loca and drank toxicly strong cocktails. The drinks were so powerful that the crowd seemed more stoned on mescal than drunk on alcohol. It was a sexual crowd, a
pickup crowd, mostly Egyptian, Lebanese, and European, and it drank in a hard, purposeful, self-forgetting way. The symbiosis of bodily, erotic freedom and alcohol once again flared up. Or as the Earl of Rochester had it:

Cupid
, and
Bacchus
, my Saints are,

May drink, and Love, still reign,

With
Wine
, I wash away my cares,

And then to
Cunt
again.

Back in Cairo, I spent some days alone at the Windsor, venturing nightly down to the decaying bar and its trophied antlers and drinking cold glasses of disgusting Omar Khayyam with plates of hummus. The place was often empty. Marco leaned his elbows on the bar, and we talked about the old days. Ah, how magnificent Cairo was then. A lake of precious distillations at which intellectuals and men of taste could sip at their leisure like glorious honeybees. It was all over now.

Where were the intellectuals and the men of taste? Where was the grace and the finesse of yore? The deep sophistication of Egypt must still be there somewhere, like a hidden river waiting to reemerge into daylight. It could never totally run dry, since from the time of the pharaoh Djoser on, it had never done so. But there were periods of darkness. Periods of
dry
.

On the pavements of 26th July, I sometimes passed old-time liquor stores, tiny dens that reminded me of the permit rooms of Pakistan. There was a larger one called Orphanides, obviously once Greek-owned; a few blocks away stood a corner store
called Humbaris, whose window was filled with unusual indigenous brews that I had not seen before, not even in the
baladis
. Here there were bottles of Zabiba Extra arak, as well as Rucard and Zahia, the latter with a lovely label of palms on a sand-yellow background. There were Grant’s and Highland whisky, Biulli’s—described as “Old Egyptian Whiskey”—and Wadie Horse (a deliberate play, I assume, on White Horse), and yet another “Egyptian” Scotch called Chivas Regal. There was a thing called Red Greec Soldier (sic), which might have been an ouzo, and Marcel J & B whisky, described on its label as “A Blwnd of the Super Old Drink Egyption” (sic). There was a potion called the Red Barrel Brand, identified as a French type “Matignonne,” and dust-covered bottles of a thing known as Valentine’s “Marceil.” Even more unnerving was an evil-looking squat bottle with a blue label marked “Vodka of Cairo.” Five Egyptian pounds
la bouteille
, it said. Instant death in a lonely hotel room.

But among these native oddities, which evade by their very nature the 450 percent tax that is levied on alcoholic imports, I found at Orphanides a bottle of Le Baron rosé “champagne.” I went into the store to buy it.

Inside, the radio blasted Islamic music and prayers, and the staff, astonished to see me, craned forward as they tried to decipher my appalling Arabic. Yes, they had the champagne, but they would have to dig it out of the storeroom. I waited, and they brought me a cup of tea. Perhaps they hoped I would buy a second bottle and maybe a bit of Cairo vodka thrown in. Eventually, however, the Le Baron appeared, heavily dusted like most
of the bottles there, and it was wiped down with a cloth and handed to me rolled in newspaper. I took it home through downtown to the Windsor, went up to my chilled room with Mustafa in the elevator, and put the bottle in my ancient fridge. An hour later it was cold.

I turned on the ancient heaters and opened the windows. Then I went to the sinister black phone sitting on the bedside table. The Windsor phones have no numbers or dials, and they seem to have been inside these rooms since about 1950. You pick up the receiver, there is a soft crackling, and eventually a voice says “Salaam.” I asked for an ice bucket. I asked for it as a joke, in fact, but the reply was “Right away, sir.” One of the ancient staff members in a djellaba and turban delivered it with thunderous punctuality. I placed the bucket next to the bed and opened the Le Baron as the evening prayers started up. There is something life-affirming about peeling back the foil cap of a champagne bottle and prying open the wires. I remembered that someone once praised a book of Henry Miller by saying that reading it was like listening to all the champagne corks in the world going off at the same time. A book, in other words, that made you glad that you were alive. The Le Baron was fresh and acidic and well made. It may have been the only North African sparkling wine, but it was a pretty good one, a noble effort to do something tricky and difficult. I had the feeling that Labib made it for his own pleasure more than anything. It had his warmth at its core, his fear for the future.

Ten minutes past six. I drank it slowly in bed, and soon the night air came up off the street, with its taste of hundred-year-old
trees and
shish
smoke and—for some reason—buttered popcorn. I made a silent toast to my mother, who would have enjoyed drinking it with me in that fusty, darkened room where the shutters were falling off their hinges. One never ends where one began, and over those two years of drinking in countries that by long tradition had decided against the corrosive pleasures of alcohol, I had come to love my 6:10 drink more than anything in the inanimate world. I enjoyed it more here than I did elsewhere precisely because here its enigma was more fragile, more lucidly despised and feared. The reasons for hating it are all valid. But by the same token they are not really reasons at all. For in the end alcohol is merely us, a materialization of our own nature. To repress it is to repress something that we know about ourselves but cannot celebrate or even accept. It is like having a dance partner we cannot trust with our wallet.

The room filled with carbide light from the street. More than at any moment in those two years, I felt the words of Pindar coming back as I drank through that entire bottle of Egyptian sparkling. The words described the god Dionysus:
hagnon phengos oporas
, “the pure light of high summer.” It was a phrase I could not forget, and I suppose it denoted something that I had been looking for all along. That light seemed to fill me right then, pouring out of those delicate rose-colored bubbles swimming at the edge of a cheap wineglass soiled by a dead ant. The word
alcohol
now seemed distant and irrelevant to this mood.

And so I thought back, as I stepped gingerly into that gentle drunken state, to the time I had lain in a field of English wheat and waited for a combine harvester to chop me into pieces. I
must have known something then that my body, at least, chose not to forget thereafter. It was a sort of forgiveness.

By the time I emptied the bottle, I was half asleep, and when I woke, the Windsor staff had cleared away the ice bucket and the glass and the bottle itself. My mother had left as well, and I was alone in the sunlight waiting for a clock somewhere to strike six yet again, as it would every day until the final call of all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LAWRENCE OSBORNE
is the author of two novels and six books of nonfiction. His short story “Volcano” was selected for
Best American Short Stories 2012
. His writing has appeared in
The New York Times Magazine
,
The New Yorker
,
Newsweek
,
Forbes
,
Tin House
,
Harper’s
,
Condé Nast Traveler
, and many other publications. Osborne has led a nomadic life, residing for years in France, Italy, Morocco, the United States, Mexico, and Thailand. He currently lives in Istanbul.