the apartment, reprise

Looking out over the Maadi neighborhood in Cairo.

My dear friend,

Even though it’s only been a few days since I returned to Cairo, it feels like months and months since I’ve seen you. Does it feel that way to you? Do you think it’s the number of miles between us that create the sense of that expanse, or is it the number of hours? I’ve always liked to rise early so that I can write before everyone else wakes; but in Cairo, I can sleep until eight in the morning (!) and still put in six or seven hours before America stirs and my phone begins to ding.

C. has been busy in my absence: teaching, reading, writing, and improving his pickleball game. (More on that some other time.) He’s also had to settle into a new apartment on his own, since we moved from our golden perch on Street 199 to a smaller sublet on a quieter, leafier block. The friend that we’re subletting from—a literature professor who’s currently on fellowship in South Africa—told us that he chose this place for the beautiful floors. At the time it felt to me like an odd way to make a choice—but now that I’m here, I’ll confess that they’re stunning: intricate, unusual, warm, and also charmingly imperfect.

C. has been in Cairo three weeks without me, and now that I’m here, he’s ready to begin exploring new corners of the city together. But even though my journey was easy—an overnight flight from Chicago to Amman, and a quick hop to Cairo—I’m feeling drained. It’s been hard for me to leave the apartment. Maybe because it’s been such a whirlwind of a summer? Maybe because the revisions I’m working on are making extra demands on my energy and vision? Maybe because of the unrelenting one-hundred-degree heat?

Or maybe because I really like the apartment?

View of the living room from the kitchen.

It’s small and fairly spare. The kitchen came with two frying pans and exactly enough plates, bowls, silverware, and cups for two, so we may not be hosting any dinner parties. We purchased one deeper pot from a cramped, cluttered houseware shop, and we’re on the fence about a baking pan. There is no dining table, but two counters: one of them with stools.

After our shower situation last year, the bathroom we have now feels like a dream: simple and white-tiled with water pressure that, while not always consistent, is stronger and hotter than I would have thought possible. The bedroom is bright, with a second door to the balcony, and a very particular floor of its own.

Our professor-friend left behind more plants than furniture. The landlord was charged with watering them before C.’s arrival, and I suspect he may have used the tap water—which, as you may recall from my laments last year about my crispy hair, is highly chlorinated. The plants are looking sad and wilty, so I’ve started watering them from our giant grocery-store bottle and, when the days cool down, I’ll take them on a little trip to the balcony. Right now, it’s too hot to do anything but hang laundry out there.

The balcony, in fact, may be what I’ll miss most about our place on Street 199. From there, we could see a slice of the Nile, a little of downtown, a road full of vendors and donkeys and motorbikes. It was lively, it was loud. It was expansive.

The view from the balcony of our old apartment.

One evening last spring, lounging on the balcony with a glass of mango juice, I watched two men bustle around their living room in the lit window across the way. I could make out yellow wallpaper sprinkled with flowers and a salon that seemed bare but for two pieces of furniture wrapped in white sheets. I watched the men spend many minutes brandishing cloths and brooms, presumably to clear out the sand—an activity which occupies much of my own time here, too. Above them twinkled a glass chandelier. We had one, too, in that former apartment. They seem to be quite popular in Cairo.

The balcony in our current apartment is quieter, which is nice, though it means we aren’t afforded those brief, twilit glimpses into other lives. It looks out over a handful of scattered trees and shrubs and a few buildings that are, like many edifices in Cairo, half-abandoned.

The view from the balcony of our new apartment.

I have yet to grasp the full extent of the housing and construction situation in Egypt (or what one author calls “the building epidemic”). Although its population of twenty-one-million pushes Cairo (designed for eight million, someone told us) near to bursting, a brief walk around the neighborhoods or a wild taxi ride along the highway will reveal hundreds of half-finished edifices, hundreds of seemingly empty living spaces. In fact, as we discovered, one need not even venture that far from home in order to investigate this phenomenon. Sometime late last year, C. and I learned that the apartment on the ninth floor (below us) and the eleventh floor (above us) were both abandoned. All these months, I’d been telling C. to turn his eerie post-rock music down so as not to bother the neighbors—and there had never been any neighbors at all!

The door to the eleventh-floor apartment was always open.

We had been riding the elevator directly up to the tenth floor and directly down to the ground floor, and so it was only when the power went off and we had to take the stairs that I realized there was no one living below us. This revelation led me to explore the level above us, too. The ninth-floor door was closed and locked, but the door to the eleventh floor apartment was wide open.

It was surreal to peer into the space directly above our living room, with its clean tile floors and well-dusted bookshelves, and find bare concrete and construction rubble and piles of tires instead.

So much sand had blown into what should have been a dining room that we could have swept for weeks and never cleared it out.

Looking out onto the roof.

We ventured one more flight up, onto the roof…

… but I was so worried about the various live (or not live? who could tell?) electrical wires strewn over the sand that we didn’t stay for long. Also, we found a headless rabbit, and I didn’t really want to find another.

I’m not sure yet if there are empty floors in our new building; certainly I know that the apartment directly above us is occupied, because C. told me that he already had to climb the stairs at six a.m. one morning to ask a British neighbor if she could step a little more quietly.

(Evidently there are benefits to living beneath nothing but rubble and sand and sunlight!)

Overall, the new apartment is bright and clean. The wifi usually works. Of course there are quirks: the riotous pounding of the washing machine is a little unnerving, and once in a while the British woman upstairs forgets to step lightly. The switches in the stairwell have symbols of bells instead of lightbulbs, and before C. clued me into this, I stumbled down the stairs in the dark because I feared I’d be ringing stranger’s doorbells instead of flipping on the lights.

On the days I’m alone in the apartment, I spend my hours reading and writing. I move from the couch to the desk to the couch again.

I know I’ll learn to love the quiet balcony. I just need to wait for the heat to subside.

Here’s the best thing that has happened to us in the new apartment so far:

Yesterday we placed our grocery order with the store around the corner. We needed two giant water bottles, which meant that the delivery guy had to cart them up three flights of stairs.

Looking down toward the front door of the building.

As C. helped him carry them in, I tried to apologize—in broken Arabic—for their heaviness.

“The problem is the stairs,” the man said.

“I know, I’m sorry. No elevator!” I replied.

He nodded. “No elevator. Not like Street 199!”

I thought I’d misunderstood him (as frequently happens in my Arabic conversations). It seemed to me that the phrase he uttered was one of the first ones I’d learned last year, in response to the textbook question: Where do you live? But that couldn’t be.

“Street 199?” I repeated.

“You were on the tenth floor!” he said. “With an elevator!”

We were so astonished that we didn’t know what to say. There must be scores of foreigners who order from that market! How had he remembered us?

The entrance to our new building.

It’s funny, the little things that make a person feel like she’s part of a community. All this time, I’d thought I’d been moving mostly invisibly through this crowded, sandy city—just one more inhabitant in a town of twenty-one-million. I thought that I was the one observing, marking, remembering. I had forgotten that others were also observing—and remembering!—me.

Yours—L.

In the entryway of our new building.