Cairo In The Dust

When Pesha and I landed in Cairo, the night air was heavy with yellow dust. The January wind was cold and thick, and I wrapped my scarf around my mouth to keep the dirt out of my lungs. It didn’t make much difference. I was already sick when I left Istanbul, the victim of too much time outside in the freezing cold on Epiphany and an inability to say no to fun. I was paying for it with my lungs, which already felt like leather bags caked with mud. The air just echoed the way my breathing felt, full of too much stuff that shouldn’t be there.

Cairo is a full-on city, dirty and crowded and obnoxiously loud. It’s also a fascinating city, swirling with secrets and stories and so much life being lived. I was warned about Cairo before I arrived, about both its awfulness and its awe, and yet nothing really prepared me for my few sick days stumbling around the streets streaked with dust.

After the first night’s dust storm settled, everywhere we went in the city seemed to be covered with a thin film of beige. Even the air seemed coated with it, with fine grains getting tangled in my hair and under my nails and in the weave of my sweater. The one respite was when we rented a motorboat and went out on the mighty Nile, splashing our hands in the frigid water. Finally, space to breathe.

Not that I was breathing all that well. In the middle of most nights, swaddled in blankets on Pesha’s friend’s couch, I woke up violently coughing.

One day dawned blue and bright, and we set out to old Islamic Cairo in search of a notebook store. The sky darkened as we rode a cab over and by the time we were in the heart of the historical neighborhood, the sky had turned a sickly yellow and men on the street were yelling at each other in Arabic.

“They’re shouting about how weird the weather is,” Pesha helpfully translated.

It was another sandstorm, even more dramatic than the first. As the dirty wind whipped between the buildings, we hid in the notebook store, gently tracing our fingers over gold-embossed leather covers and creamy paper, and watching as the outside world became an uncanny shade of poison yellow.

We spent the rest of that afternoon keeping an appointment with an urbanist in Zamelek, who defiantly smoked cigarettes at the dust and lost his train of thought in the papers and notes that surrounded his desk like a fortress of feathers. I tried not to cough too much as we poured over maps of the city and sipped our coffees and watched the outside world fade into sand.

The sandstorm only lasted through the afternoon, but everything I owned felt heavy with it, so when we made our way to Giza on a clearer day, I still felt weighted down with dust. Maybe that added to the hazy woozy wonder I felt at the pyramids. I was warned it was an overrated tourist trap but I was enthralled anyway. I went inside a pyramid and was gripped immediately with claustrophobia; I preferred the pyramids from the outside, where I could admire the way the geometry of the structures punctuate the desert, and the way the desert punctuates the city.

When I think of Cairo, my chest seizes up again, tight with the wonder and the frustrations and the heaviness and the dust of that strange city. In more than one way, it took my breath away. I loved it, and yet, I was relieved to leave it, and breathe again.