Who is the Most Interesting Person You Met Today?

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Rameses Hilton
Cairo

Who is the most interesting person you met today?

My knee jerk reaction is to say Tohary Elkerdawy, a man I met on the observation deck of the Cairo Tower. The tower is a tall, slender concrete structure with a lattice exterior – an arabesque – with diamond-shaped holes every few metres which expose the building’s inner core. It rises 187m above Zamalek, a large treed island in the Nile that is home to the Cairo Opera House, an athletic club, a few large western hotels, and the Tower, which you can see from Tahrir square and the Egyptian Museum. It is the tallest man-made structure in the city.

A flight of polished steps leads you up from the garden that surrounds the tower to a lobby where a small grey elevator takes you up. It is a modern building, but the elevator still has an operator, a throwback to the days when elevators were cantankerous mechanical organisms that needed care and attention. The operator was a young man in a uniform – dress pants, a collared shirt and a vest. He ushered us in – five young and mostly slim Egyptian men, my mother, and myself. He pressed a button that any of us could have pressed, and when we had reached the top, ushered us out. I am a firm believer that all work is honourable, but that said, I would rather not have the honour of his job.

The observation deck encircles the tower, and is wide enough for two people to walk abreast if they are friendly. I suppose hostile parties could turn sideways and imagine the other does not exist.

Cairo in September is warm. In the middle of the day, with the sun beaming in a cloudless sky, the temperature runs in the high 30s. On the tower’s exterior deck, it was at least that warm, possibly warmer because we were high in the air, that much closer to the sun.

From this height, you can see that Zamalek is an island, and that the Nile passes it on either side, grey-green and placid. Farther out, over the iron railing that prevents you from walking out into space, you see Cairo: mile after mile of dun coloured apartment buildings and mosques. From this height, there doesn’t seem to be much difference from one block to the next. Almost everything is about 8 stories tall, and is made of brick. Some of the big hotels are taller, as is the massive Mogamma, an artless government building that embodies what George Orwell had in mind when he wrote 1984. And it goes on for as far as the eye can see, which is limited by smog, and eventually, the hills to the east. You can see the pyramids if you know they’re there. They are three grey triangles on the south-west horizon, two large ones, and one noticeably smaller.

It was here, while working up the nerve to leave the security of the tower wall, and step out towards the railing that I saw a man in his 40s taking his own picture with a cellphone. I carry a massive SLR around my neck that is impossible to miss, even if you have turned sideways and are trying to imagine that I don’t exist. It screams both “tourist” and “photographer” -- serious photographer, even. So I often get requests from other tourists to take their pictures because I must know what I’m doing.

“Could you? Selvie?” The man held out his phone to me. “No problem,” I said. He struck a pose, and I snapped a picture of him with apartment blocks and haze behind him. “Let me take another,” I said, and moved to get his other side, which was in better light. I handed the phone back. “You’d better check,” I said. “Did I do it right?” He looked at what I had done, and then motioned for me to join him at the railing. He put one arm around my shoulders, and with the other, took a picture of the two of us. Selvie, I thought. Oh. Right.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Canada,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. He paused, and I could see his face shift and twist the way it does when you try to think of a word. “You speak English?” he asked. I said that I did. He responded with a slightly disappointed expression. “French?” I suggested. “Italian?” I asked, holding my thumb and index fingers apart to show that I spoke only a little. “Arabic,” I said, pinching my fingers almost shut. We laughed. From then on, he simply spoke Arabic to me, most of which I did not understand. I did catch that he was from, or was soon going to Ad-Dahar in Hurghada, a resort destination on the Red Sea. “In your plan?” he asked.

In your plan. This is not really what he said to me. A native English speaker wouldn’t word the question that way, and I doubt even the most misdirected English-as-a-Second-Language course would either. In your plan. From the context alone, I could tell that this was not what he said, leaving me to surmise that somewhere, in the Arabic language, there is a string of words which, when said 187m in the air, sound exactly like the English words “in your plan.” Douglas Adams suggested this very thing was possible in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, but in his book, it happened on a distant world between alien species. Here in Cairo, it was between two middle aged tourists who were trying to find words to communicate under a scorching sun.

“Fadze,” he said. “Fadze book.” He held up his phone and pointed to a white lower case letter “F” on a blue background, the icon for Facebook. I lit up with recognition which encouraged him. “Facebook, What’s App, Learn,” he said, showing me the apps he had on his phone. He started “Learn” which turned out to be something that teaches you to read and speak other languages. He tapped the screen, and a woman’s voice said “The girls play basketball,” in clear English. Words appeared on the screen as the voice read them out loud. “Cool!” I said, and I meant it. “I need this to learn Arabic.”

Tohary and me.

“Number,” he said. “Fadzebook number?” Was he asking me for my Facebook page? I’m not even sure how to do that. Does it really have a number? I have no idea. Facebook is a program that I sometimes look at, but I have never really figured out how to use it properly (whatever that might mean. Do I imagine it has a wealth of untapped features that, because of my ignorance, are only for the cognoscenti?) “I don’t have a phone,” I said. This was almost true. I have a phone, at home, seven time zones away, which I sort of know how to use, but not really. It does not have Facebook on it.

I ended up shrugging. “No cell phone. My sisters have cell phones”, I said, for no particular reason. “They use their phones all the time. They’re young. I’m too old for them.” He said a few more things in Arabic to me, which were tantalizingly familiar. Ana min . . . – I am from. I heard him say the number one, and “Hurghada” again. Neither of us really seemed to mind that we were having almost no success in language.

“Have you walked all the way around?” I asked, gesturing to the walkway. He shook his head. I made a gesture that I hoped would be seen as “Let’s walk”, and so we slowly headed back to the other side of the platform where we could see a different, but similar view of the city. By then, my mother had found me. She had been off speaking to a group of happy young women from Cairo and Palestine who were taking in the sights. “This is my mother,” I said. They shook hands and after a few smiles, he suggested we take another picture, this time with the three of us.

I pointed to the indistinct pyramids off in the distance. He did something with his phone which brought up pictures of himself at Giza: Tan pyramids against a deep blue sky. A friend standing in front of an Old Kingdom tomb. Himself, in profile, slightly stooped, appearing to kiss the Sphinx on the lips, even though it was actually off in the distance. We all had a good laugh when we saw it. I have seen a lot of silly tourist pictures, but I hadn’t seen that one. There were pictures of a party, and in some of them, a young man in his 20s, with an open face and short dark hair. His son. “Nice,” I said, nodding in approval. Look at any cellphone, anywhere in the world, and this is what you’ll see: Pictures of good times, good friends, and the people you love.

He tried his Facebook question one more time. In desperation, I reached into my knapsack, and brought out a pen and a small notebook. It got a good reaction. He wrote his name in English and in Arabic: Tohary Elkerdawy, followed by his Facebook something-or-other, which he wrote entirely in Arabic. I can recognize Arabic letters when they are carefully printed, but handwriting is subtly different, and is more of a challenge. “Thank you,” I said. Shokran. I pointed to my mother and my self, and then to the elevator. It was time for us to go. We shook hands, and went our separate ways.

I can only hope that tonight, Tohary is with friends, and that when he shows them pictures of the strangers he met today, high atop the Cairo Tower, that he will have kind things to say about them, and that he will talk about how we came together over his cell phone more than how we didn’t come together when it came to language. And that he will laugh when he tells the story.