Cairo, Page 21

  The streets of the city center, with their rusticated and cupolaed apartment houses, traffic lights, and café awnings, re-created the life of European boulevards down to the last detail. A stroll down ‘Imad al-Din Street would take one past such establishments as Tonazakis’ Patisserie, Claridge’s Restaurant-Bar (prop., Georges Boucherot), and Joseph Glaser, framemaker, next to the Empire Cinema. The nearby American Cosmograph played silent greats to the strains of an orchestra conducted by maestro M. Poliakov. Occasionally the cinema hosted gala events, such as the charity ball for the Cairo Jewish Hospital on February 15, 1928, reported by the weekly Étoile Égyptienne:

  Toward midnight, amid general animation and with the champagne flowing freely, it was time for distribution of cotillions and prizes, to sustained applause. Then Kiku’s jazz band struck up, and young and old danced into the early hours.

  The leading hotels of Cairo were top-rate, according to the 1929 Baedeker: “At most of them evening dress is de rigueur at dinner.” The opera, which still maintained gauze-screened boxes for veiled ladies, kept busy with a polyglot round of performances. Its 1929–30 season offered three amateur productions in English and one in Turkish, twenty-two plays and comedies in Arabic, twenty-five operettas in French, and fifty-five operas in Italian. The newsstands at Mengozzi’s bookshop on King Fouad Avenue sagged under sheaves of local foreign-language journals: Le Progres, La Bourse Égyptienne, Le Journal du Caire, La Liberté, La Patrie, Le Reveil, and four other dailies in French; a handful in Greek, Italian, and Armenian, as well as the English-language Egyptian Gazette, founded in 1881 (and still going in 1998). Francophone scientific and literary reviews proudly displayed Cairene inventiveness. It was on their pages that Cairo-born poets Ahmed Rasim and Edmond Jabes and the novelist Albert Cossery began literary careers that would carry them to later fame in Paris.

  Important social occasions brought together all the city’s tongues and confessions and persuasions. On May 15, 1928, for instance, Cairo’s high and mighty gathered at the plush, Babylonian-style temple of Shar Hashamaim on Maghraby Street for the wedding of the daughter of His Eminence Senator Chaim Nahum Effendi, member of the Egyptian Academy and grand rabbi of Cairo. Among the guests were the ministers of war and of public instruction (both Muslims), the minister of foreign affairs (who was a Copt), and a former minister of finance (who was Jewish). King Fouad graciously delegated his master of ceremonies to attend. The governor of Cairo made an appearance, too, along with assorted ambassadors and bank chairmen and the gorgeously bearded delegates of the Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Coptic Orthodox, Coptic Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox Churches, as well as scions of such prominent Jewish families as the Cattaouis, Mosseris, and de Menasces (the latter three being French-speaking but by origin respectively Egyptian, Italian, and Turkish).

  Cairo no longer aspired to be cosmopolitan; it already was. According to the 1927 census a fifth of its people belonged to minorities: there were 95,000 Copts, 35,000 Jews, 20,000 Greeks, 19,000 Italians, 11,000 British, 9,000 French, and uncounted numbers of White Russians, Parsees, Montenegrins, and other exotica. (By contrast, all colonial India in 1930 was home to just 115,000 people classified as “whites.”) The city’s population surged past 1 million in the 1930s as landless peasants began to arrive in significant numbers, along with a rich clutter of Europeans fleeing Hitler. Thirty thousand cars jammed streets where sleek apartment buildings pushed ever higher. Billboards touted a range of Cairo-made goods: “Shelltox—The Insect Executioner”; “Exigez les Eaux Gazeuses N. Spathis!”; Dr. Boustani’s Cigarettes; Bata shoes; and movies shot in Cairo studios, such as Layla, Girl of the Desert, a costume drama starring Bahiga Hafiz.

  Foreigners still dominated business. A single European bank, the Banque Beige et Internationale, owned all of Heliopolis in addition to Cairo’s entire tramway and electricity networks. Sixteen of seventeen subcontractors for the sheerly modernist Immobilia Building, an 18-story, 218-unit downtown apartment complex completed in 1940, were khawagāt. The chief of the Central Bank in that year was still a Sir Edward Cook; Isaac Levy was the head of the Federation of Industries. But under a treaty Egypt had signed with Britain in 1936, foreigners’ legal privileges were to be phased out within ten years. Already Cairo produced its own skilled engineers and architects and financiers. By 1948 Egyptians owned 40 percent of shares on the Cairo Stock Exchange, and four-fifths of shares in companies formed since 1933. The richest tycoon in the city (aside from the king) was a pure Egyptian: Abboud Pasha, sugar magnate, proprietor of textile mills, chemical plants, and shipping lines—and owner of the Immobilia Building.

  The city was cruel as well as sophisticated. In the 1940s half its children were dying of diarrhea and malnutrition before the age of five. While literacy among foreigners pushed 90 percent, only one in seven Egyptians could read. Away from the spacious streets and grand villas of the new quarters, the vast majority of Cairenes made do without running water or electricity. They could only dream of a day when they could buy a bicycle or even a pair of decent shoes.

  EUROPE AGAIN rumbled into war, and Europe’s troubles again reverberated in Cairo. Pressed to stretch its treaty with Britain to the fullest, Egypt granted the Allies use of its bases, ports, and railroads. With Italy attacking from its colony in neighboring Libya, and Germany advancing down the Balkans to Greece, Cairo again fell under martial law. Censorship was imposed, and this time thousands of Italian Egyptians joined Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, and others in prison camps.*3 In a typical wartime tragicomedy, quite a few Austrian or German Jews were Catch-22ed into the same prison barracks as diehard Nazis.

  By 1941 a total of 140,000 Commonwealth troops were stationed in Cairo. Officers accustomed to London’s Blitz languished in the city’s swank hotels, joking that, if all else failed, the sleepy service at Shepheard’s famous Long Bar was sure to defeat the German advance. (Reveling in his reputation, the Swiss barman Joe fixed a house poison called The Suffering Bastard.) Here those well-born few who had wangled commissions in the more romantic units—in espionage, counterespionage, or sabotage—traded tales of raids in the desert and of parachute drops to Balkan partisans. But in this class-ridden army the better bars were off-limits to the troops, most of whom were billeted in flea-ridden suburban camps. On leave in the city they did what soldiers always do and misbehaved. A favorite Tommy pastime—reminiscent of prankish Mamelukes—was to knock the fezzes off as many Worthy Oriental Gentlemen as they could. Another was to sing along as the Egyptian national anthem was played at Cairo’s movie houses, but with obscene lyrics that began:

  Kind Farouk, King Farouk

  ’Ang ’is bollocks on an ’ook

  The more artistically minded among the occupiers toured mosques and dabbled in poetry, but even this latter conceit betrayed antipathies. A certain Private Broome penned this unlovely verse about Cairo, and had it published in one of the city’s several wartime literary reviews:

  Howling hell of every breed

  Every color, every creed

  Indigo Nubian

  Swarthy Greek

  Overall that garlic reek

  Shouting vendors seeking trade

  Beggars sleeping in the shade

  Clanging tram

  Raucous horn

  “Backsheesh!” from the newly born

  The loathing was more than mutual. Egypt was fed up with the Inglīz. Most Cairenes longed to see them lose.

  King Farouk, a rapscallion of sixteen when he ascended to the throne in 1936, hated the limits Britain imposed on his freedom. In particular he bridled at the heavy-handed nudgings of London’s ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson. The six-foot-five diplomat, who in not-so-private referred to Farouk as “the boy,” felt Egypt should have a more convincingly anti-Axis government. On February 4, 1942, Lampson rolled tanks up to the gates of Abdine Palace. The king was ordered at gunpoint to name Whitehall’s choice, Mustafa Pasha al Nahas, as prime minister. Farouk was still relatively slim, relatively chaste, and overwhel
mingly popular. His humiliation was felt by every Egyptian, and even more acutely by the Egyptian Army, which swore personal allegiance to their king.

  Cairo swallowed its pride for the time being. The occupying army’s over-whelming presence made active resistance unwise. Besides, the spectacle of khawagāt at war proved diverting. Enjoying their front-row seats, the city’s café gamblers wagered on Hitler’s mustache or Churchill’s cigar. Meanwhile, exotic extras swaggered across the stage, among them the toppled emperor of Ethiopia and the exiled kings of Albania and Greece (the latter inseparable from his English mistress), Prince Paul and Princess Olga of Yugoslavia, and plotfuls of hangers-on and pretenders. At the Mena House Hotel by the foot of the Pyramids, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek conferred in November 1943. Owners of nearby villas that were to house the great men’s entourages hiked the rents outrageously. Back in the city, a cast of refugees worthy of the set of Casablanca—that one-horse town at the wrong end of the Sahara—mooned about gin joints and lobbies, getting fleeced by bazaar hustlers and entwined in black markets.

  Indeed, moneymaking on a colossal scale smoothed Egypt’s feathers better than anything. Leaving aside the untold marginals who prospered as shoeshiners, grifters, and so on, the British Army directly employed 200,000 Egyptians. Local industries flourished as imports dwindled. Between 1940 and 1943, bank deposits, the dividends of the Egyptian Hotels Company, and the stakes at the Gezira racetrack tripled. The number of millionaires rose from 50 to 400. At the war’s end Britain owed Egypt £500 million.

  There was much drama to be relished before the finale. In the summer of 1942 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps pushed to within an afternoon’s drive of the Egyptian capital. At Cairo Station it was mayhem as thousands fought for space on trains to Palestine. Ambassador Lampson tried to calm nerves by having his servants repaint the cast iron fence at the Residence, the palatial Victorian mansion by the Nile that still serves British ambassadors. But the starched upper lip wilted for all to see when the British headquarters in Garden City incinerated its archives to keep them out of Nazi hands. Egyptian nationalists looked on gleefully as charred imperial secrets gusted through the streets.

  Paper trails of another kind led British spycatchers on a desperate hunt across the city, from the Turf Club bar to the Kit Kat Casino and at last to a luxury houseboat moored on the Giza shore. They were in luck. The Nazi agent they caught had been woefully indiscreet. Addicted to high living, the dashing German Egyptian had spread a telltale chain of forged banknotes through half of the city’s nightclubs.*4 Still, the fact that he had sneaked into Cairo at all, crossing 2,000 miles of desert from Libya to skirt the front lines, gave the Allies a scare. They were also impressed by the cleverness of the German cipher, which was based on Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling spine-chiller Rebecca.

  Far more helpful to Rommel than his spy’s barside gleanings, in fact, was the American military attaché. With innocent diligence he reported every detail of Britain’s desert campaign, beaming messages to Washington in a code that the Italians had long since cracked. The loophole was only just plugged in time for Britain’s last-ditch offensive at El Alamein, fifty miles west of Alexandria. The October 1942 battle was to be the turning point of the Desert War.

  Rommel, starved of supplies because of Hitler’s suicidal assault on Stalingrad, retreated helter-skelter toward Tunisia. By 1943 the war had receded from Cairo for good—just in time, because the champagne had finally run out. Water pipes burbled now to intrigues that were closer to home. Muslim radicals began to agitate for guerrilla action against the British. Much to the embarrassment of Cairo’s Anglophile Jewish aristocracy, Zionist extremists murdered Lord Moyne, the British colonial secretary, as he left his house by the Gezira Sporting Club in November 1944. A month later a nationalist lawyer smuggled a pistol into the Egyptian parliament, which had just, belatedly, declared war on Germany. Firing point-blank, the assassin shot dead the new prime minister, Ahmed Pasha Maher.

  As Berlin fell and thousands of Egyptians lost their wartime livelihoods, censorship was lifted. Scandal after scandal shook the city. Nepotism, graft, stock-market fixing; no tool, apparently, had escaped the grasp of governments held unnaturally in place by British arms. Corruption continued unabated into the late 1940s, but the most titillating rumors were of another kind, and all focused on one man: King Farouk.

  THE KING IS playing poker at the Royal Automobile Club on Qasr al-Nil Street. His opponent calls, tabling three aces. Farouk twirls his mustache. He has three kings. His pudgy fingers flick down the cards one by one. “King of hearts,” he says. “King of spades. King of clubs.” He pauses for effect, then thumps both palms on the tabletop: “And the king of Egypt!” With a great belly laugh Farouk scoops the pot. His henchmen cackle.

  The tale is apocryphal, of course, but utterly in character.

  By the time he was deposed at age thirty-two, Farouk had become a byword for rottenness. But a mere dozen years before his demise the boy king had thrilled Egyptians as a latter-day Tutankhamun. When he married seventeen-year-old, sweet and chaste-looking Farida Zulfikar*5 in 1938, Cairo crowds went so wild that half a dozen people were trampled to death in the crush. At least the well-wishers’ wallets were safe: so fervent was the patriotic mood that the Cairo pickpockets’ guild had advertised a moratorium on liftings for the royal wedding.

  Farouk was the embodiment of all the youthful pride that colonized Egypt desperately needed. The first of his dynasty to speak decent Arabic, the young king was tall, good-looking, and ostentatiously pious. After an assassin’s potshot missed, courtiers fanned the tale that the bullet had lodged in the Koran that he never failed to carry in his breast pocket. For a time Farouk sported a holy man’s beard. He even hired a genealogist to prove that his great-grandfather Muhammad Ali was descended from the Prophet. Such appeals to Muslim feeling helped ensure that when his cronies rigged the 1939 elections, bringing in a government of bootlicking royalists, few dared to complain. Farouk was no fool. Right to the end his political meddling was oiled with bribes, threats, blackmail, and the slickest publicity.

  At heart, though, the king was an amiable joker. A typical Faroukish tease, he booby-trapped the Abdine Palace reception rooms with a giant tiger skin, placed just on the exit route where bowing, backward-walking supplicants were bound to trip over it. Farouk had Cairo’s most notorious Fagin sprung from jail to teach him the pickpocket’s trade. Bored by protocol, he tested his legerdemain at an official dinner with Winston Churchill. As the whiskey-soaked prime minister patted his pockets—his missing watch was a prized heirloom, having been a gift from Queen Anne to Churchill’s ancestor the duke of Marlborough—Ambassador Lampson purpled with apoplexy. The grinning boy let the diplomat stew, then clapped his hands. A footman produced the trophy with a flourish.

  Farouk owned four main palaces, innumerable rest houses and hunting lodges, a private train, and two splendid yachts. But his favorite toys—at least before he discovered buxom ladies—were cars. Farouk loved to drive himself, at high speed, and so kept 200 automobiles, including a Mercedes sent as a gift by Hitler. All were red—in fact, no cars but the palace’s were allowed to be red. Setting a fashion that persists among Cairo’s latter-day klaxomaniacs, he fitted some with trick horns. One Packard faked the yelping of a dog, which made for laughs when other motorists swerved, thinking they must have struck some poor cur.

  Cosseted by yes-men, unbounded by money or appetite, fun-loving Farouk was doomed to decay. His humiliation by British tanks was compounded by Queen Farida’s inability to produce a son and heir (and, rumor had it, by her taunts about his impotence). The foiled monarch bloated and balded. He became a predator. He could not be refused. When Farouk crashed parties, hostesses rushed to hide antique baubles and virgin daughters. Ten years into his reign, students at Cairo University hissed at their king. The message was clear. Farouk had somehow to retrieve his popularity.

  He chose to play a reckless
king’s gambit. Posing as leader of the Arabs, he donned his supreme commander uniform, mounted a white charger, and reviewed his troops. Then he sent this untested army of peasant conscripts to Palestine, where the nascent United Nations had just decreed a Jewish state. Ibn Khaldun could have predicted the outcome. New nations, the Arab sage had theorized, were made by nomadic peoples inspired and united by a sense of mission. Old states crumbled when their dynasties and great cities grew pompous and effete. The Palestine War of 1948 pitted two such opponents. Egypt fought in halfhearted defense of its Palestinian neighbors’ rights, with an eye to profiting from an inflamed Arab nationalism. Israel’s citizen army fought for a millennial dream; it battled against its own burning nightmare of racial extermination.

  The Egyptians were trounced. The ragtag Israelis overran their U.N.-decreed borders, hounding half a million Palestinians into permanent exile. Israeli speedboats sank the Egyptian navy’s lumbering flagship, the Prince Farouk. Egyptian soldiers complained that their guns had literally backfired. They were right: arms-dealing buddies of the king had sold his army dud World War II leftovers. While at an isolated Egyptian outpost a valiant major named Gamal Abdel Nasser withstood a month-long Israeli siege, Farouk played poker and cavorted with khawāga girls in palace bubble baths. Muslim and Zionist bigots united in fury: both his current mistress and his poker pals were Jewish.

  In the middle of it all—with bombs exploding in Cairo cinemas and Jewish-owned department stores; as prisons filled with Israeli spies, Communists, and fundamentalists; as yet another cholera epidemic raged—the now corpulent Farouk capped his annus horribilis by divorcing Farida. From then on his fortunes tailspinned. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated first the Cairo police chief and then another prime minister, Mahmud Pasha Nuqrashi, who had made the fatal error of banning the shadowy organization. Palace thugs retaliated swiftly, gunning down Hasan al-Banna, the Brotherhood’s founder and Supreme Guide, on the steps of the Young Men’s Muslim Association.