Zahma

No car here ever truly dies. Every taxi is a resurrected Fiat, bristling with soldered wires and wires that go nowhere, innards stripped down to metal frames and door handles jacked from washing machines. Cairo's streets are full of these mummified cars: semi-preserved shells and raw mechanics reluctantly sparked to life.  Their native tongue is honking--but beyond its powers of expression, the horn may also substitute for brakes.

There's no such thing as jaywalking in these streets, because there's nothing besides jaywalking. On this day I walked from the Mosque of Ibn Tulun to the Mamluk cemetery, and had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about traffic lanes and lights. I may as well have waited for the Red Sea to stop and let me cross. It may work for Moses, but for the rest of us mortals, we have to say a prayer and dive into the mass and the mess and the glorious noise.

In Cairo

Cairo was a lesson in un-learning men. It took a few days to train my eyes to the ground, to back down if I made eye contact with a man in the street. Apparently it was my responsibility to prevent passing men from acting like assholes. The women frightened me nearly as much: when I first got to Dokki my sister told me, "watch your back outside, especially around women." I didn't understand, but then she pointed to my back where, because I was bending to unpack, I had exposed a strip of skin above my jeans. "It's haraam. Women will come up to you and yank it down for you in public." On my way to the churches of Coptic Cairo, I stumbled onto a women's car of the Metro. I was covered--more so than the girls on the car in Westernized clothes--but I wasn't fooling anyone, least of all the 4-year old on her mother's lap, staring at me as if a man had just sat down across from her. But though I wasn't a part of it, there was a quiet solidarity in that car. Halfway to Mar Girgis, one girl crossed the aisle to ask another to pour some of her bottled water onto a handkerchief, so that the first girl could wipe off her hands. I rode the F from Brooklyn to midtown every day for a year, and never saw such presumption of the kindness of strangers.