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Rose of Cairo, where can I leave you that you will be safe and sound? I fear for you at the hands of lovers inflamed by prolonged deprivation. I fear for you at your own hands, at those of the taxi driver who gives me a richly sentimental look, as though congratulating a friend on a joyous wedding or consoling him for a loss. The driver’s a young man, bidding farewell to his thirtieth year with all the enforced jollity he can muster to distract himself from his fate. He’s like millions of others from Imbaba, their lives mapped out before they’re born: their destiny and standing an inheritance. Each and every one will start driving microbuses before the government’s laws have granted them driving licenses. The government has its “legal ages” and people have theirs. The officer will approach “Mahmoud” and ask him about the driving license at which our driver will utter the immortal line: “In the village, when you’re sixteen you’re a driver…” He drives off leaving behind the cops from the Nile-side police station next to Kit Kat Square, where King Farouq once made pilgrimages in search of pleasure, the king whom the Free Officers said was “no innocent”. Memories linger on of the king turning up here, late at night, speeding, then stamping on the brakes to send the car spinning round and round, leaving skid marks the width of the square to fill the void that psychologists will tell you lurked within a king who never escaped his father’s grasp—the father who left his teeth marks on his wife’s neck—his soul a prisoner of his Austrian upbringing. Games filled this vast soul’s void, which rang like finest china, china whose maker had chosen his ingredients with care. But it is kings that get to choose their raw materials. The sons of Southern villages don’t care about raw materials: they drive tin cans that Egyptian wags have nicknamed “Ramses” in reference to a former glory that might excuse the poor quality of manufacture and the very cheapest materials. Necessity is the mother of invention. Necessity reshapes raw materials to allow the inhabitants of this lower earth to fill their voids with play as the king did himself.
2.
“Mahmoud” sits in the driver’s seat as though he’s sitting outside his house waiting for afternoon tea, an image immortalized by old novels and picture postcards of Cairo life. It particularly applies to those waves of rural immigrants who took on the city’s hues only for those same colours to fade with the trials and defeats of the modern state which, any examination of its history will show, worked against its own modernity, or rather, that it reserved its modernity for its upper classes, while lesser roles required the attitude, “Our brothers up top, take a look at those down below…” These words were sung by Adawiya as Cairo was losing the coherence it had enjoyed in the 1960s, when Umm Kulthoum’s audience would attend concerts in European dresses and suits, smoking American cigarettes, as though invitees to a celebration of upward social mobility—or otherwise to confirm that they had risen—in outfits that have long vanished, hidden in the wardrobes of a lost and confused social class that the likes of “Mahmoud” can no longer remember. “Mahmoud” talks of “life going on”, unconcerned with how it goes on because it is just Fate, carved on the walls of class temples which are decorated with nostalgia. Nostalgia, which every social class summons up as a sort of sacred text that talks of a “Golden Past”. Nostalgia is half of “life goes on”, O Rose of Cairo, who brought the streets of Zamalek to a halt, O Beauty of 25th July Street, leaning out of the Cabriolet and singing, the booze charging your voice with delicacy, sweetness and anger all combined. A scene that aroused smiles, yearning and concern at reality’s relationship with cinema, or perhaps at reality’s ability to transform the imagination into a tame tabby purring alongside cars at rest by the curb, but which, at your approach, springs up to find a quieter spot.
3.
The city gave its packed-in rural residents none of these beautiful Sixties’ dreams, dreams from the age of the Opera House. So the country folk did not wait in their villages for the miracle but rather rushed forth to the factories of Imbaba, to the universities of Giza and Ain Shams, targeting a place in the army of state bureaucrats. The city is a gift the ruling gods made to themselves, either consciously or unconsciously denying its inhabitants the opportunity to share it with them. After two hundred years the city remains the preserve of these gods, who still feel empty, that they deserve to rule a better people, a country more beautiful. Its founders filled this emptiness with trinkets that gave them somewhere to live more lovely than Paris, a lodestone for waves of immigration, one of which washed up the Swiss chocolate-maker Giacomo Groppi. King Farouq loved the chocolate he sold at his café, made according to a secret recipe written down in French—and secret to this day, though we live in the age of “life goes on…” The Brotherhood businessman Abdel Azim Luqma bought up the café, turning this icon of monarchy and modernism into just another asset on his books. He removed its colour scheme, dismantled the bar and stripped the walls bare of everything except a nostalgia which mourns the cream of society which once sampled crème Chantilly brought to their tables by G. Groppi himself, with European breakfast delicacies like the croissants that he elevated to another level with the addition of marron glace. Or the ice cream, said to be the Swiss genius’s greatest contribution to the battle against Cairo and its stifling humidity. In the 1970s, when we were children growing up in the Delta, this ice cream used to arrive each week in refrigerated trucks to the one store that sold treats to those in search of something from a distant world, who celebrated wildly when they got hold of their very own silver block, its foil covering peeling back to reveal a delicate yet firm layer of Groppi’s chocolate beneath which lay the sensual, the classy, ice cream. And now, after all these years, here I am, Rose of Cairo, waiting for you here in Groppi’s bleak interior, come in through the side door, nothing like the mosaic main door, now faded till nothing remains of its legend save the founder’s name. A huge chiller cabinet displays the classic ice cream treats, but it’s missing something. After a few steps inside I don’t even want to be a Cairene. Indeed, I leave before you arrive, O Rose of Cairo, because the waiter—abandoned like a neglected museum—hadn’t realised that I was looking for my entrée in my quest to be baptised into the city’s brethren. The waiter wasn’t tender enough to understand my sense of alienation, my desperate hunt for a lover who was waiting for me, and whom, I feared, I was late to meet. A romanticism created by the pictures of the Swiss chocolate maker, which I first saw after my own status as Cairene was settled. He confused me: round spectacles, hair groomed more like a Mafia killer than a sweet-maker who turned out luxuries, the markers of entry into the upper classes of a strange, and extraordinary society. “Mahmoud” kept taking about just how “life goes on”. As we crawled past the legendary café in Talaat Harb Square, slowed by the Ramadan traffic, he didn’t turn to me once, utterly absorbed in his affectless account of Groppi’s secret recipe.
4.
“You can’t have heard of Groppi…”
Before making this provocative remark I’ve realised that “Mahmoud” isn’t talking about the high-class clothes and customers long disappeared, nor the bewitching flavours that are brewed up in some well-hidden arm of the Groppi network that runs from Suleiman Pasha to Adly Street. As I wait for the answer I am fully aware that “Mahmoud” is no expert in the still-secret recipe. As for Luqma’s heirs, they’ve all left Egypt to live in Europe and the entire operation left to rot.
Groppi’s life “goes on”, though it’s become just another asset on the books of owners who care nothing for the dream of the Swiss chocolate maker and his Brotherhood successor that it should shape tastes and fashions. “Mahmoud” neither dispels my fears nor confirms them: “Our Groppi isn’t the one you know…” He explains: For us, Groppi is the cake bits they sell in the big stores, which our sweetshops can buy and put together together as they please. We call them Groppi.” It’s not important that the “Groppi” he’s referring to actually originates from Groppi and Sons. It’s the concept. Imprinting a name, a symbol of a former order, on the broken pieces of the “life goes on” existence.
5.
I wanted to know how the rest of the menu went.
If the pudding is “Groppi” then what does he call his main course? “Mahmoud” doesn’t wait for me to ask, adopting the pose of the theoretician of “life goes on-ism”, its evangelist. And I fear for you at his hands, O Rose of Cairo, I fear his complete absorption in the system, in the world of “lets invent the tools we need to survive”, of “let’s practice our own brand of fairness and split the pastries with you”. I feared he’d offer his hand to you in marriage and that you’d fall victim to your seasonal weakness for the “working man” for the men who “struggle to make their crust”. I feared he’d come to every day with a delicious dish of the finest cuts of meat. “The leftover meat from your meal, know what happens to it? The owner of your fancy restaurant doesn’t throw it out, no. He collects all the leftovers together and sells them to some buyer from our area, and that buyer sells them to our best eateries, the ones with a reputation for being classy. They wash that meat and sell it to discerning customers from our neighbourhood.”
Rose, I know you’ll need a yoga session after listening to this taxi driver, a cog in the system, a man who avoids anger, who waits for the world to move like his toes move at the end of his sandals, opening that let their straight in without need for the advanced technology that puts special holes in the fabric of expensive shoes to coddle your feet. Did you know that Groppi opened his stores long before the “Barefoot Resistance” mounted its campaigns? That just because someone buys expensive shoes it doesn’t mean they won’t assault you some day, at one of those packed Eid parties, those celebrations of sex that are like a mob hunt. They are good-hearted. Victims. They try to purchase the ingredients of the upper classes and reproduce them, but the expensive shoes won’t help them move or rise from class to class. The only help they’ll give them is at one of those annual hunts. They know that pleasure is a process requiring complex reproduction and display to prevent life “going on” as normal, the point at which they turn from victims into criminals and this, O Rose of Cairo, is a harsh and painful experience.
