Week 4, 2026: Lady of the Nile
The week started with a fridge clear-out that would force me to go to the supermarket and buy vegetables. Medo started the week by breaking his bed. I’ve weirdly dealt with a lot of broken beds in the last few years. I spent my life having never witnessed a bed break, didn’t know they got up to that. And then in the last few years: The one in my fancy ensuite that I paid £200 of my assistant salary to replace, the murphy that was basically a floor mattress, the one in the flatshare that needed reassembling every time it felt the weight of two bodies.
And now this one in Heliopolis. I heard the loud crack of wood spitting out nails from where I was sitting in the living room and then silence. And then ‘Oh my god I just broke the bed’.
There was nothing to do so I said let’s ride Uber motorcycles to the sports club. I remembered the experience of riding them with Juri three years ago as fun and not scary at all. This time, I kept thinking: Wow I am not wearing a helmet. Wow this car is nearly touching my knee. They would not recognize my face in the morgue. Very good girl gone bad of me to die on the road having skipped a bra and a helmet. My hair, all big and flowy in the January wind, that part was nice. I learned that it feels a lot less scary to do things when I feel pretty. I’ll schedule all scary things during my ovulatory phase moving forward.
If I could live anywhere in Cairo, it would be Maadi. It’s got its own little community, everything you could need. One of every cafe, one of every tree and bar and type of person. One thing I noticed here, in Cairo in general, is that nobody counts cash after me. I asked a food delivery guy if he was going to count the money I gave him and he shrugged and said ‘no miss’. I don’t know if it’s nihilistic to find that sweet. When I tried to explain the kindness of people here early in the week, I ended up saying ‘they don’t count cash after you’.
I don’t know much about TV but S6E3 of Girls is good TV. Lena Dunham is so good at capturing specific anxieties that women experience. Unrelatedly, if it feels hard to say no, try saying not now. That works too. Say not now and then when you’re alone again, practice saying no. Get comfortable sitting in an awkward silence elongated by somebody who wants you to say yes and not rushing to kill it. I should watch the whole show at some point.
El Horreya is the coolest bar in Cairo I think. El Horreya means freedom in Arabic. And freedom looks like a rundown cafeteria-turned-bar filled with old locals and young expats and cartons of beer. There is no menu but if there were, it would read: coffee, beer, soda. The coffee is always Turkish and the beer is always a Stella. It’s been around since the 30s and sits not too far from Tahrir Square. You can only imagine the kind of conversations that took place here, what was organized between these walls. It feels like this is where Habermas’s coffeehouse would have been. It’s an extremely special place in my eyes.
When I stepped in, the bartender said ‘what are you drinking’. I only had one foot through the entrance. If I took one step back, I would have been back outside. I said ‘oh cola I-’ and he said ‘go sit over there’ and pointed to a secluded area. As I took off my puffer jacket, I realized that he had split the room so that the sobers were sitting to the left of the room and the drinkers were to the right. I accepted my fate and adjusted my seat at the kids table area.
He brought me a pineapple Fayrouz. He looked at me for a beat as he put it down and said ‘what a beauty’ and it threw me off-guard because I had gotten used to men mostly ignoring me here. Got used to paying for stuff and then watching servers hand the change back to my brother. If it wasn’t for the magic of El Horreya, I might have felt lonely. It was a while before I found a man towering over me. ‘What are you reading?’ he said. Early 50s, fedora, big smile, all teeth. Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, I said, and showed him the cover. Fedora didn’t seem to know or care for AKT and his next sentence explained why. ‘I’m from Ramallah’, he said, ‘I’m here for a signing’. I’m from Palestine too, I said. And then I told him where in Palestine I was from and he asked for my family name and I told him it.
‘Why don’t you come sit with us? I’m here with some Palestinian artists, some are from Ramallah too’. I considered it. Sure, I said. Fedora smiled big again and looked down at my drink. Do you mind beer, he asked. I told him I don’t drink but I don’t care if he does. I got up and held my puffer jacket and Fayrouz in one hand and my book and phone in the other, tote bag on my shoulder. Fedora kept looking back at me like I would change my mind and run away, still smiling with all of his teeth. And I started thinking oh god what if this is a terrible idea but I wasn’t going to back out now. This could be good fun. It’ll probably be nice and if it wasn’t, it would be interesting, and if it wasn’t, it would be funny.
When the bartender saw us crossing to the other side together, he got extremely angry. He started yelling at us. He yelled ‘THIS IS NOT ALLOWED’ and then repeated that a few times. I was frozen in place, confused as to what exactly was not allowed, but Fedora looked ready to counterargue. I felt like we did not deserve to be yelled at and was so curious to learn about the bad thing I did. He yelled ‘This is not allowed. It’s not allowed for a girl to sit with a bunch of men she has never met before. You cannot sit together if you did not come together’. Fedora immediately swore on his life that we knew each other. She’s from Palestine, he said, we’re friends. I wanted to back him up but I was still frozen in place.
The bartender was not having it. Neither was Fedora. They were nearly holding each other, both yelling, neither backing down. I didn’t understand why Fedora was so passionate about my joining his table and why the bartender was so passionate about my not joining the table. This was my fate and I cared much less than either of them. Every time the bartender spoke, he began with ‘this is not allowed’ like he was clearing his throat. He yelled, ‘This is not allowed. The government says it’s not allowed, I’m not making this up. There are cameras around us capturing this. I don’t want to get arrested again. Don’t make this hard for me’.
The word ‘arrested’ hit my ears like sirens and I looked around and saw people looking at us. I felt my cheeks get hot. He was implying something that people around us were going to start believing the longer I stood there. The bartender looked at me with menace in his eyes and said ‘If you want to be allowed here again, you will go back to your seat right now’. Fedora looked ready to keep going but I gave him a long look that made him go quiet. I put down my Fayrouz and handed the bartender a fifty and took back all of the change.
The first person I wanted to tell the story to was Gallal but I didn’t or couldn’t. I was recently thinking back to the time we were on our fifth Peroni or something and he said ‘in French, we say Le Caire. It comes with an article, just like in Arabic. But it’s just Cairo in English. Isn’t that interesting?’. I was, as always, charmed by how he said really smart things while heavily slurring. I said ‘yes that’s very interesting’. What about the way the bartender got so angry like there was no alternative to his truth, the way I was made a whore for saying yes to conversation. Isn’t that interesting?
The next day, I told the boys about the strange events at El Horreya. In the back of the Nissan, relating the story exactly as I told you, watching their eyes and mouths widen. We meant to check out an open mic but we got there late, so it was dinner and a walk by the Nile instead. H and I started arguing about whether we had gone to El Horreya together (we had) and he said ‘why don’t we just go there and I’ll see for myself’. I was wearing yesterday’s clothes and felt weird about being back so soon but pushed the feeling down.
When the bartender saw me, he said ‘we’re busy, come back in an hour’. So we sat in a nearby cafe, digesting the testimony to my story with mint tea. H said he really wanted to go back there and start a fight. I said that sounded unwise. He took a long drag of his cigarette, then stood up and said he’ll be back soon. When he came back, fifteen minutes later, he said they confirmed my suspicion. In the Nissan, H said ‘screw Freedom’. And we laughed.
On the weekend, I bought a box of baklawa and passed by my aunt’s place. We lunched on dawood basha and I gave good pets to their noisy little dog Ash. We talked for hours while Ash napped on my thigh. Her crochet projects, her weekends in the countryside as a child, my love for the show Al Kabeer, the concept of barakah, the overlap between tipping culture and hustle culture. It was the longest conversation I’ve had with any of my father’s siblings and I enjoyed every minute. The stories I was told about Egypt growing up were often about the military and chaotic bachelorhood. It wasn’t until my aunt told me about fresh bread and white-only laundry and bird farms that I realized what I was missing.
A common insult here is calling someone a farmer to mean they’re acting vulgar. It is so rooted in the zeitgeist that people often hide that their ancestors were farmers. I didn’t grow up with the insult, so I didn’t inherit any of the internal shame, but I was still raised to hide the fact. It soon became a visceral secret, much like learning to keep your legs closed as a young girl. You are yelled at enough times and your legs cross as easy as blinking.
It was so nice to hear the stories of my green-thumbed ancestors. I find it hard to fully wrap my head around feeling ashamed of descending from people who worked hard and poured love into the land. I would like to learn more about ancient Egypt, the pharaohs and the Coptic calendar and the Nile and the pyramids. I want to have a garden and grow beef tomatoes.
As my aunt flipped through old photos, I caught one of my grandfather grinning in a suit and had to steady myself. A beautiful man with kind eyes. He tried to teach me how to play chess on the computer, long before I knew about hotmail and flash games, but died before I got a good grasp of it. It's been eighteen years and I still suck at chess.