the apartment
My dear friend,
Have you tried to send me anything? It’s been a few weeks since I’ve heard from you, and I’m beginning to feel that I’m writing into a void.
Our building is the one on the left. We’re ten floors up.
To be fair, if you have tried to send me a reply, chances are that it won’t find me. We’ve been living here for a month already, and I have yet to see a mailbox. The other day, when we asked the woman who owns our apartment what address we should use to receive letters and the like, she told us: “Mail doesn’t really work in Egypt.” We posed a similar question to a long-time expat, who explained that packages are held up at customs and subject to arbitrary taxes—and even if they’re eventually released, they aren’t delivered to home addresses. “We gave up and just have friends bring things when they come,” she said.
So far, no one has come. Will you?
The view down our street.
Although our building is assigned a number, it’s challenging to use it as an address because there are several buildings on the street with the same number. The first time our Arabic tutor came to the house, she arrived a few minutes late, flustered and apologetic. She had tried several wrong buildings before locating ours.
It’s a little unsettling to realize that even if someone comes looking for us with the correct address in hand, there’s still a chance that we may not be found.
The elevator plays a song as we shuttle up and down, but we can’t understand the words. We’re the only apartment on our floor, and the space is divided into a public space (living room, kitchen, dining room, half-bath) and a private space (bedrooms, full bath). Between them stretches a very long hallway, decorated with framed black-and-white photographs of the pyramids, the Nile, and the desert. Most of the apartment is painted sunflower-gold.
We spend the majority of our waking hours in the living room. The air conditioning works well; the light is lovely. It’s true that the wifi flickers in and out, but when we’re really struggling to connect to the Internet, we move to the backup router we’ve set up in the bedroom-office. When that one goes out, we return to the living room. It’s a long walk back and forth through that hallway, but because of the way the rooms are positioned, we’re always walking toward the doors of a balcony. At night, buildings glitter through the glass.
The living room.
Often, when the sun begins to set, we head out to the balcony. That’s also where we hang our laundry after running it through the washing machine in the kitchen. We’re finding that laundry takes a lot of time because, if the water pressure dips too low while the machine is running, it will stop. This week, we’ve had this trouble more often than not.
Lately we’ve been spending more and more time waiting for the water to return to the tap. For the third day in a row, I turned on the shower but nothing came out. Yesterday my efforts to make dinner were thwarted when I couldn’t get enough water to rinse off the peppers.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
In Egypt, C.’s students have explained to him, “things don’t work.” Of course this isn’t entirely true. Some things can be counted on. Every morning, with the consistency of a German train schedule, the fruit and vegetable vendor rattles his cart through the street while his calls resound between the buildings. Every day, the elevator plays its favorite (only) song. Every day, too, the wifi and the water return. We simply need to be patient.
I wish that our apartment included a pantry, so that we didn’t have to store groceries on the bookshelves. I wish that it weren’t so difficult to find ice cubes. I wish that the burners had a setting between “very low” and “very high.” I wish that the flies couldn’t find their way in, and that the shower, when it works, didn’t smell like chlorine. I wish that the counters and light fixtures and wall switches weren’t always coated with sand.
Still. In the evening, when I’ve finished teaching in the office-bedroom on our backup wifi, I step out onto the back balcony and the breeze lifts my hair from my shoulders and I consider the lights of this city with something like calm. In the morning I slide out of bed and boil the water for tea and write for a while while the sun soaks the silver curtains. A little later, I can hear C.’s steps padding down the long hall to join me.
The groceries, though piled on the bookshelf, currently include buttery Egyptian cookies and the creamiest boxed milk I’ve ever tasted. A shower feels pretty wonderful when the water returns. Someone even shared a solution for the flies: just open the doors and windows at dusk, turn off the lights, and wait. (We were astonished to find that this worked. But also, it seems like a fairly common solution to everyday problems in Cairo: just wait for a while and see if things change.)
It’s not an easy place to live—this apartment, this city. Every day there’s a new challenge. Often, we’re frustrated.
And yet, each time that we step outside the door, we have no idea what awaits us. Isn’t that why we came?
Yours—L.
