One of the many amenities of our elegant aparment here in Cairo is what is charitably known as a semi-automatic washing machine. It works like this: you put your clothes in a big vat on the left side along with soap which you have to manually fill with water using a hose connected to a tap on the wall. The hose doesn’t connect well, either to the machine or to the wall, and it sprays water all over; you can only use cold water because the hot water here is so obscenely hot it seems like it might melt the rubber hose. Once the tub is filled, the machine half heartedly tosses around your clothes for fifteen minutes in their own filth – which I note is quite extreme here – and then you turn on the drain, remove the clothes, and move them to another compartment on the right side. Apparently, this is called the dryer. It spins your clothes, and you have the option to rinse them by attaching the hose again while the clothes spin. The timer on the dryer can’t be set for more than five minutes, so you end up going to the bathroom to reset it five or six times before the clothes are finally dry enough to be taken out to hang on the line without tracking water all over the apartment. On the line, your clothes dry in the hot Cairo sun and take on just enough dust and dirt to be comfortably stiff when you put them on again.
At best, you do the whole cleaning cycle twice – clean, “dry,” clean again, “dry” again, and then hang them outside – and you have reasonably clean clothes. This hasn’t been possible for the past couple weeks, though, because the dryer section of the machine has been broken – it seems to get bogged down with water and stop spinning very quickly, which means you can’t really rinse your clothes. We all want to do laundry right now since we all leave in the space of the next sixty hours or so, but with the machine in its present state it’s a bit difficult.
Max, in particular, hasn’t taken this very well. He’s been trying for weeks to get Mansour, our bawab, to have the machine repaired. Mansour kept saying sure but then not getting a repairman over until the other day when his nephew came by to ask for his monthly payment and Max told him we wouldn’t pay until a repairman came. The next morning, one showed up and theoretically fixed the machine and we payed Mansour. But by the next day, the machine was broken again, and Mansour has thus far failed to bring someone else by to fix it. Yesterday, he said someone was coming at 2:00, but he never showed up. Max, one of the nicer and gentler people I know, is about as mad as he gets, frustrated with the impossibility of getting some simple things done here sometimes.
Last night, this frustration turned into a conversation between Max, Lizz, and I about Egypt, Mansour, and related subjects. We were discussing Mansour’s current living situation – his wife is in Aswan giving birth to their first child because she doesn’t really like living in a garage in Cairo, and Mansour is having to share is tiny apartment and bed – not to mention his meager income – with his nephew Yahiya, who is sort of an asshole and has come to Cairo to live with Mansour because he needs work. As near as anyone can tell, Mansour’s job is about enough work for 1/4 of a person, and now it’s being done by two people for the same amount of money, which is unfortunate for Mansour because he has a new kid to support.
In any case, during this conversation, Max again became frustrated with Mansour about the washing machine because getting it fixed is basically the one thing any of us have ever asked Mansour to do for us. Max was talking about how the only thing that seemed to work was withholding his money, which we’ve now paid, and Max seemed to think he was going to have to get a bit more aggressive again if we wanted the repair done quickly. It was decided that Max would curse his children to look like washing machines if ours wasn’t repaired soon.
Obviously, this is all in jest. In fact, Mansour is a wonderful bowab, honest and trustworthy. Also very good looking, and we’ve decided as a house that were there an issue of GQ about bawabs, Mansour would probably go on the cover.
***
Yesterday, too, I finally started feeling better. I had lunch with Reham and another friend at the French cultural center, which was tasty, and then in the evening we had a girl come by to look at the apartment since our lease is up at the end of August. Max and I took her up to meet Safi, and we ended up hanging out for a while in the Madam’s penthouse apartment, which currently is under renovation and without floors or interior or exterior walls. I’m not sure if this is normal in Cairo, but I was surprised to find that in the absence of a floor in this 6th story apartment, the ground was sand. I guess they do have a lot of it here.
Afterward, we went to the roof and drank tea with Safi and his friend Ibrahim, which was nice as always. Hopefully I’ll be able to go up and hang out with him once more before I leave.
***
Lizz and her mother leave late tonight, Lizz for Turkey for vacation and her mother to her new job in Bangalore, India. A college friend of Lizz’s was supposed to also arrive late tonight in Cairo and was going to stay with us for a couple days, and I had been given all his information since Lizz wouldn’t be here. Lizz had planned to call him a nice Yellow Cab to wait for him at the airport to make sure he got in alright, etc., but then last night about 1:45AM Lizz realized that he landed in fifteen minutes rather than in 24 hours like she thought. She frantically tried to arrange airport pick-up for him, and ran out of credits on her mobile while on hold with the cab company. Then she remembered we had the number for a driver who only works at night, so she called him with my phone. He was on vacation and asleep, so she woke him up. Then finally she got through to the cab company and they agreed to send out a driver, but when he arrived he called very upset at the idea of waiting for this guy and decided to leave the airport. At that point we gave up and just decided to hope Matt was resourceful enough to get to our apartment on his own. Two more cabs called me, somehow, to assure us that they were waiting for him and that his flight had landed. It hadn’t, though – it ended up being two hours late – so I’m not sure who those drivers were or what they were talking about. I also got two missed calls from a number that always was busy when we tried to call back.
Matt did make it safely to Garden City at about 5AM.
