The Cairo Bandit

Chapter 2- Saeed

2006-10-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

Saeed was the filthiest man I had ever laid eyes on. He stunk of a deep, nauseating stench that is only possible with a long-term commitment to not bathing or caring about the excretory functions of your body. It was a high-class stink that bypassed the tight security checks of your nostrils and took the fast track to your stomach.

Short as one could possibly be without being classified as a dwarf, Saeed’ had a belly that resembled a soccer ball suspended over his waste line in a gravity-defying fashion. He had a perfectly round head with tiny locks of curly brown hair interspersed with grayish streaks that were more a testament to the elements and the sedimentary, synthetic nature of grime than the passing of the years. His high pitched voice or hyena-like laughter assaulted your ear drums with devastating impact.

You could never find Saeed when you wanted to, he always found you. And when he found you, you would never see him coming. He would materialize, just like he did the very first time we met him. He had no address, no telephone number, and we never figured out what he really did for a living. He never borrowed money or requested payment for the services he rendered, but somehow always seemed to be solvent. He never had enough cash on him to arouse suspicion, but always managed to survive, and sometimes even thrive. Most people within his socioeconomic bracket would rely on public transportation, but Saeed only took taxis. Most Egyptians smoked the local Cleopatra brand, but Saeed insisted on Marlboro reds. And he had friends in high places.

Filthy as he was, Saeed was one the most charming people I had ever met. Despite an initial repulsion of his physical being, most people cannot help but be enamored by him just like a drug that at first tastes foul, but ultimately delights you with its hallucinogenic effect. Even when he reaches up to your ears to whisper one of his vulgar, sexist remarks, you forget how queasy he made you feel when you first met him. He was almost like a little boy - an optical and auditory illusion that was further enhanced by his small size and pre-pubescent voice.

But of all the mystery and intrigue that shrouded Saeed, it was his uncanny ability to convince anyone, to do anything, at any time that most captivated us.

It was a sweltering Thursday evenin in the summer of 1989. I was working frantically to produce three high quality fake IDs for myself, Abe and Jessie. By today’s standards, a first grader can probably put together a more convincing bogus document. But for a 16-year-old college student without the future luxury of supper glossy photo paper, ink-jet printers, and a Wikipedia imagination, I had done a stunning job.

I overlaid a passport photograph on a piece of plastic-edged cardboard that I had nicked from the library. I cut out text, logos and background colors from old issues of Newsweek and Time to create the artwork. I finished it off with a hot iron to seal the plastic edges and simulate a laminate. Forgery was just another desperate attempt on our part to be allowed into one of Cairo’s hottest night clubs.

A week earlier the three of us were unceremoniously denied entry to the Tamango disco at the Atlas hotel by its fascist thug of a bouncer, Sameh. We were audacious enough to be underage, but worse still as far as the club’s entry policies, we were chronically womanless and extremely horny – two highly undesirable currencies for any distinguished night club keen on balancing testosterone levels.

All through summer we were trying but failing to patronize the legendary joint. But rumors of rampant sexuality, secret orgies, free booze, celebrity strippers at after parties, and a vibrant female clientele that came in all shapes, sizes, races and levels of promiscuity strengthened our resolve. Jessie and I were also very adamant to get our virgin friend Abe laid on our clock.

I was to engrossed with the final touches to the fake documents for the night that I almost did not hear Sayeda knocking. I must have looked completely insane to her when she walked into my room with the paranoid sounds of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon floating out on my brand new Sony boom box, and as I stood in my boxers in front of the ironing board pressing a little plastic card.

“Would you like me to iron something for you?” she asks gently.

“Oh no, I am not ironing clothes Sayeda!” I giggle. “But thank you anyway.”

“Shall I prepare dinner for you, you hardly ate your lunch?” she asked.

“Thanks, I will eat out with my friends tonight,” I said finally looking at her in the face, having completed my home-made lamination.

“Well if you want anything before you leave, let me know. I think I will go to bed now, I have a really bad headache,” she says, as I notice her head scarf tied tighter than usual around her forehead.

“Sorry to hear that. Just a headache or a migraine?” I asked, trying to sound concerned without prying, just in case her impending period is the cause of her headache.

“What’s a migraine?” she asks innocently.

“It’s a severe type of headache, that usually affects just half of your head,” I explain to her as I point with my hand to half of my head. “Is that the type of pain that you have? Deep and sort of penetrating into your eyes?”

“Yes, I think that is what I have,” Sayeda says as she nods, looking at me with awe.

“Well my mother gets it often, and she says that the best cure for it is to rub your head with Vicks, and then tie it with a scarf really tight, and go to bed,” I advised her.

“God bless you. I will do that.”

Although Abe was the virgin, he was the only licensed driver. Jessie lived a walking distance from my place, so he came by and we both waited for Abe to pick us up. Shortly before midnight, the three of us were dutifully standing in line at the doors of the Tamango, this time not as the starry-eyed freshman students at the American University in Cairo, but as a truck maintenance engineer, a florist, and a cabinet maker from the beautiful island of Mauritius. At least that’s what our driver’s licenses said we each were.

Standing in the tight and hot conditions of the hotel’s lobby, we try to keep our spirits up. But as the doors of the club finally open, the little euphoria that we have is quickly dissipated as Sameh begins his weekly routine of filtering out the usual fodder of gay Saudis, trouble makers, drug peddlers and any one who was under-aged, under-privileged, or underground.

“We are so fucked – again.” I say in a low, glum voice. He is not going to buy it, especially with our dicks so blatantly stamped on our foreheads."

Nonchalantly, and as if he was part of the conversation all along, a fourth person creeps up from the sides and starts chatting.

“This is the worst club in Cairo for picking up women. The few chicks who come here have padlocks on their vaginas. They will bleed you dry before they put out,” he says calmly.

He was a diminutive, dorky looking guy wearing a leather vest in the midst of July, and a baseball cap at midnight. With the stealth of a frog’s tongue, his tiny, sweaty palms extend to greet us, without even giving us the option to decline making his acquaintance.

“I am sorry, do we know you?” Abe asks.

“Delighted to meet you, my name is Saeed,” he said, all the time smiling and grinning, and still extending his hand.

We each greet him but we are all visibly distraught by the terrible whiffs exuding from his body. With a stench that lethal, your first instinct is to determine where it is coming from, rather than what it is. There was no doubt where this particular smell is sourced, but we are too physically paralyzed by the strength of the assault to even attempt to flee the scene. It must have been Jessie who first spoke.

“Well we actually heard that this is pussy central. We want to try our luck. Do you come here often?” he said, smirking at the thought of a low-life like Saeed inside Tamango, when three “gentlemen” like us have never made it past the doors.

“Every now and then, and only when my friends really, really want to. But when my friends and I want to pick up real women, I take them to very different places,” he says casually.

“You mean you can get us in?” a visibly skeptical Abe inquires.

“Give me 35 seconds.”

Five seconds: Saeed makes his way to the top of the queue like a tiny grasshopper and taps Sameh on the hips.

Ten seconds: Sameh looks extremely agitated as he peers down at Saeed, curious to see what insect dares to invade his personal space.

Fifteen seconds: Saeed begins to whisper something in Sameh’s ear and at any moment now I expect Saeed to be punched in the face and thrown out. Sameh listens but his fists are clenching and his facial expression is becoming more ferocious by the second.

Twenty five seconds. Suddenly, Sameh’s facial muscles morph from rage into a huge smile and he starts laughing hysterically like he just heard the funniest thing ever. He relaxes his fists, and pats Saeed on the shoulder like a master would do to his loyal dog and then nods in approval to him.

Thirty seconds: Saeed motions to us excitedly to come foreword and before we know it we are whisked by Sameh and another bouncer inside Tamango barely hearing the fading complaints and slurs of other disgruntled patrons still waiting in the queue.

Thirty five seconds: we are in!

I am too excited to even notice that Saeed was hanging on to my arm like a rag doll as we rush inside the club. He tugs at my shirt to get my attention.

“Ya basha! Ya basha! Are you happy with me?”

I reach to my wallet to fish out a tip, and before I even get a chance to ask him what he had told Sameh, Saeed puts something into my shirt pocket and quickly vanishes in the throng of gyrating human bodies and pulsating techno music.

Chapter 1 - Sayeda

2006-09-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

I wake up to the delicate sound of rain drops on my window pane at 4:02 a.m. I am floating in the purgatory between sleep and consciousness, but still mindful of the peculiar anomaly that it is actually raining heavily in Cairo during the driest month of the year. Maybe I am still be in Nairobi? I start dreading the malaria-bearing mosquitoes that always follow tropical rainfall, but the bitter taste of quinine in my saliva reassures me that I am sufficiently inoculated against this terrible tropical illness.

No, I surely must be in Cairo. This distinctive smell of damp concrete and parched desert flora soaking up rain water in a frenzy confirms it. But the real proof is my very own jasmine tree outside my bedroom window. I can smell its exuding fragrances, now amplified in celebration of the unexpected precipitation. I fell in love with this tree and made her mine when I was only three. It has been a comforting and nostalgic constant in my nomadic and rootless life.

When it was finally decided that I would join my brother in Cairo to start my college education, one of the few things I found myself looking forward to was the daily sight of the majestic flower-studded branches of my jasmine tree hugging the wooden shutters of my bedroom window. I always thought of her as my protector against the outside world. She sheltered me and softened the elements around me. When the city outside would be baking under the afternoon sun, my jasmine tree would only permit the cool, ambient golden light rays to enter. During the winter months, I never felt the bitter edge of the cold desert nights. And the brutal cyclonic Khamaseen winds and sandstorms of March and April were always defeated at my window by the branches and foliage of my guardian tree.

My mother swears that this tree appeared mysteriously around the time I was born, a revelation that only intensified my mystical attachment to her.

I am still not completely awake, but sufficiently conscious to notice that my naked body is drenched in sweat. Sure the rain must have taken the edge off the summer heat, but there is no doubt in my mind that summer is upon us. July of 1989 will go down as one of the hottest months in Egypt’s recorded history.

As my pupils dilate and adjust to the light, the flicker from the television static illuminates the outline of my belly. It bears incriminating evidence of what had transpired between me, myself and I shortly before I passed out in bed a couple of hours ago. The intoxicating mix of musk-scented aloa vera body lotion, and traces of my own organic viscid, whitish fluid say it all.

There is an unfamiliar and repetitive moaning sound coming from outside my closed room. On any other day, it could have been my brother and one of his girlfriends insensitively fucking in his room with the door wide open for the whole world to hear. But my brother has been skiving from school and is probably at our beach house with a bunch of his friends. The noise could only be coming from the only other person in the house, Sayeda, our live-in house keeper who had retired to bed shortly after dusk, complaining of a bad migraine.

I decide to get up and investigate. I fumble to find my shirt, and eventually locate it, crumpled in a messy ball on the floor and wreaking of cigarette smoke and alcohol-infused sweat. It’s un-wearable, even by my own liberal standards. The whiffs of Vodka and Marlboro smoke take me back to the events of last night.

Abe and Jessie picked me up at 11:00 p.m. and we drove to Tamango. We had been planning this night for weeks. It should have been our spectacular debut on the Cairo clubbing scene. Three sexually charged and socially-aspiring college freshmen, eager to find a clique, just as we were desperate to find girl friends. The night didn’t quite work out as planned. It was, to say the least, fraught with the most bizarre turn of events that until this day I am unable to explain or account for.

I came back home drunk – far more from the capricious events of the evening than the booze I had consumed. I tip-toed gingerly to my room to avoid waking Sayeda up and it must have been 3:00 am. when I finally stripped naked, crawled into bed with my body lotion, and started watching Debbie Does Dallas, an erotic film that I had stolen from my father’s private collection in Nairobi.

Sayeda is much more than our ‘cleaning lady’. She is our officially appointed surrogate matriarch while my parents are away serving our country on a diplomatic mission in East Africa. She doesn’t just cook, clean and launder; she manages the finances of the house and exercises unbridled authority over the domestic discipline of our lives. Her younger and less experienced predecessor had quit without giving prior notice after an inebriated guest – the son of a prominent minister in the Egyptian cabinet – decided to grab her ass and dry hump in our kitchen, during one of my brother’s infamous “home alone” parties.

This caused my mother unending distress. She flew back to Cairo almost immediately to find a replacement. She hired Sayeda after falling in love with her ”earthy, maternal qualities” and recognizing that the wisdom and maturity of her soul made her the perfect candidate to mother us, while maintaining the necessary discipline. And to ensure that she did not abandon us, Sayeda’s living conditions were rendered extremely comfortable. Her bedroom has a private en suite bathroom, a small fridge, a radio cassette player, a television, and a VCR with an extensive library of her favorite Arabic films, plays and classic television shows. She gets two day off every week (which she never actually takes), and once every two months an all expenses paid trip to her village (again, another perk that she hardly ever uses).

The moaning does not seem to subside so I begrudgingly put on a pair of boxers and follow the sound all the way to Sayeda’s room across the corridor. Even though it is summer, the icy cold marble floor of the corridor awakens my senses. Her I am standing outside her room light headed, cold and half naked. I can hear my mother’s unequivocal voice ringing clearly in my ears: “You must respect Sayeda’s modesty - don’t you dare run around the house in your boxers! She is from the country side, remember that.”

I am about to knock on her door, but I hesitate and once again cannot escape my mother’s stern voice as she lays down yet another cardinal rule: “Respect her privacy and never barge into her room or invade her personal space.”

“Sayeda? Are you okay?” I whisper softly from behind the door without knocking. No answer, but the moaning continues.

As I stand hapless outside her door, I realize that I know very little about this woman who lives with us. Our parents were keen to raise us with what at the time seemed to be a contrived notion of social equality with regards to our domestic helpers. Theoretically, there was no master and worker (there was), and we were all supposed to be one big happy family (often, we weren’t). “Respect their dignity. Never talk down to them. Always ask politely,” my mother would admonish us when one we strayed from that tenet.

But I hardly ever spoke to Sayeda. Occasionally I may compliment her delicious cooking and she would giggle ecstatically in gratitude. Sometimes we would exchange a few words about her favorite Arabic soap operas and I would pretend to be interested, briefly. Mostly though, we spole in the mornings when I was late for class and frantically trying to locate my wallet and car keys.

Sayeda came to us from the northern town of Mansoura. The only thing I knew about her previous life, second hand from my mother, was that many years ago she married her cousin Abdo, an unemployed construction worker. A few weeks after their wedding, Abdou set out to Iraq in search of work, which he found almost immediately. He started sending back money to Sayeda and his parents, and occasionally would communicate with them via cassette tapes with voice recorded greetings and news about his life. Exactly one year after he first left, and without warning, Abdou disappeared never to be heard from again.

Many Egyptian laborers who “vanished” in Iraq in the mid 1980s were presumed to have abandoned their families after being seduced by attractive, and sometimes wealthy Iraqi widows of the Iran-Iraq war. Other less fortunate ones had signed up unwittingly to join the Iraqi army and possibly died in conflict, or were executed as defectors by Saddam Hussein’s regime when they attempted to return to their homeland.

Neither the Iraqi embassy in Cairo nor the Egyptian authorities could provide Sayeda with any definitive information on her husband’s fate. She lacked the resources to find him on her own, and so, after four years of waiting for Abdou, she finally divorced him. With no education or labor skills, domestic service is the only means of support for an impoverished rural woman like Sayeda.

If I did not speak to Sayeda often enough, that is not to say that she was totally invisible to me. Sometimes I would notice her stunning emerald-green, kohl-lined eyes and beautiful, rosy-cheeked face. Like most Mansourians, Sayeda’s physical features were a genetic fingerprint of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition in the late 18^th Century. She was almost thirty, and just a little plump, but I could never make out the exact contours of her body which was always obscured under modest and shapeless tunics.

Her head is always covered with a scarf, so I have no clue what her hair looks like underneath, although I often wonder. She is a sturdy, powerful woman who could lift an arm chair on her own. I sometimes sneak a quick look at her smooth and well defined legs when she is on her knees diligently polishing the wooden floors. She caught me doing it once, and I could see a shy smile forming at the corner of her lips and her cheeks flustered and ruby red. I was surprised that her toes were always elegantly manicured and the soles of her feet were soft and clean, rather than dirty and cracked as one might expect a life of domestic labor could inflict.

I put my ear against her door and noticed that the moans were almost rhythmic and not nearly as distressed as I had originally thought. But I am still concerned about her well being. I can hear other noises in the background that I am equally unable to identify. I drop to my knees and look through the key hole but because her bed is at an angle, I can’t see anything except the flickering light of her television, although the volume is quite low.

I push my ear against the key hole and can vaguely discern that whatever she is watching is actually in English. I listen harder and manage to identify one phrase: a female voice screaming “Oh Mr. Greenfield!” relentlessly.

Where did I hear this before? Mr. Greenfield? I keep listening and now I can also hear the sound of a squeaking bed, almost in perfect unison with the rhythm of Sayeda’s less than innocent moaning.

And it suddenly dawns on me. The notion is so implausible that I hit my head on the door handle and almost fall off my knees. I run back to my room, breathless and this time impervious to the cold marble floor. My heart is racing with giddy excitement as I stare at the VCR player, almost certain of what it is about to reveal. My trembling finger presses the “eject” button. Nothing. The Debbie Does Dallas tape that I was watching before I fell asleep is missing. And I know exactly where it is.

All I can think of is the image of Sayeda tip-toeing into my room and stealthily removing the tape from my VCR, only to rush back to the privacy of her quarters for her own “session”. She came inside as I lay naked and almost comatose, my body glistening with that self-inflicted “viscid whitish fluid of the male reproductive tract consisting of spermatozoa suspended in secretions of accessory glands”. I am mortified and my ego is bruised. Not so much because my clandestine late-night escapades with hand lotion and video erotica have been exposed, but because seeing me in my pathetic post-orgasmic slumber, surely confirms to her that I am a sad excuse for a sexually active young man. At least not compared to my “stud” brother who is visibly busy fucking his way through college.

I sit down on my bed to collect the multitude of emotions and thoughts throbbing in my head. Eventually my indignation fades, and I am left with the intrigue. Her actions are so out of character and entirely premeditated. Here is a woman who essentially does everything for me, short of wiping my ass, and yet I knew next to nothing about her true self. I was convinced that her idea of pleasure was limited to watching mindless television or humming along to Om Kalthoum classics as she sits on the floor of the kitchen rolling grape leaves or crushing garlic.

And now I am faced with the vulnerable reality of her human sexuality, replete with her carnal cravings, I cannot help but see a sardonic parallel to our lives. The “sophisticated master” and the “humble servant” living under the same roof, coveting the same lecherous things, and using the same means to satisfy their burning needs, on the very same night.

How pitifully naive and wretchedly elitist I am. I pretend to live by an egalitarian edict, when in reality I never really saw Sayeda as anything more than a “maid” hailing from the same peasant stock that for hundred of years served our master class. In my mind, I never granted her the mental courtesy to have ever imagined her lying on her sore, tired back at the end of a long day serving us, fingering her clitoris for raw sexual pleasure. Sayeda is a woman, and I never saw it coming.

How she acquired a taste for Western erotica, let alone the circa 1970s variety, left me baffled. Religion and strict cultural constraints in patriarchal rural Egypt surely instilled in her the fear of God that expressions of sexuality by women must be limited to the confines of matrimony and for the sole purpose of procreation. Sex for the sake of sexual ecstasy is a ‘man’s prerogative’, while women were essentially stoic cooking, cleaning, household vials for breeding.

I close my eyes and can still hear the echoes of Sayeda’s moaning - now evolving into quasi-screaming - ripping through my soul. It’s a thrilling delicious sound, as ancient as humanity itself, and although I try to resist at first, I cannot help being aroused by it.

I wonder if she strips naked while she is lying on her bed pleasuring herself, just like I do. What is going through her mind when those beautiful eyes of hers are closed, her strong legs are spread wide, and her soft feet arched in pre-climactic bliss? Who, in her deepest fantasy, is riding on top of her, fucking her?

Quite possibly, her three weeks as Abdou’s bride were the sum of Sayeday’s sexual life. Was she dreaming of her ex-husband pinning her firmly to the bed and breaking into her virginity, as she bites her tunic to suppress the pain and her screams of hunger? Could it be that someone other than Abdou is haunting the expanse of her sexual universe? And when she sees on film the innocent Debbie swallowing Mr. Greenfield’s predatory and oversized cock into her mouth, sucking it, and all the time looking at him coyly from below as she moans in pleasure, and as he eventually splatter’s her face with his outcome, does she wonder what it tastes like? Does she frown on Mr. Greenfield’s rear penetration of Debbie’s anus as an “unnatural act that rocks the throne of God and solicits his eternal wrath”? Perhaps her finger also wanders there, eager to emulate Debbie’s apparent bliss that results from Mr. Greenfield’s rear-side invasion.

Suddenly, Sayeda stops screaming, and I can hear her bedroom door opening and her footsteps fast approaching my room. She is coming to return the tape. I panic and the only thing I can think of is to jump in bed and pretend to be still asleep.