Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
how gets in. I'm reading every face, ready for a mouth to open, a finger to point. Instead, the
firstgaspcomesfrominsidemyveilwhenToriandIpassafull-lengthmirrorinthefurniture
mart and neither one of us appears.
It's easy to fall into reverie when you're not speaking, when you're staring through a slit,
when you're dividing focus between your feet (
step with care, step with Tori, do not step on
the hem
) and your head (
stay, veils; stay, veils; slide a little slower if you cannot stay
), plod-
ding and plodding, past the aisle of toilets, the doves in cages, the Qurans on tables, bikes on
train tracks, cassettes on dirt, heaping mountains of defunct remote controls. This
souq
lies
on the edge of a cemetery, under the shadow of a raised highway. The market will go up in
flames mere months from now, a fire sparked by a car accident; within a year, the entire city
will be ablaze in political protest. But no one this Friday morning knows any of this. Today
is about trade. You can buy hawks here. You can buy hedgehogs here. You can buy 1970s
exercise bikes here. There's a man who swallows shards of glass, another who sells busted
keyboards. It all blends together like a long and lovely hallucination, a market I dreamed up,
letting boundaries blur, as dreamers do, letting the
souq
be two things at once, as things in
dreams—behind the curtain of closed eyes—can be: squalid and splendid, treasure and trash.
If Tori speaks up, it's only to comment on the breeze. Tori loves breeze. When a rare
gust of air makes it under her
niqab
, she thanks it aloud. If I speak up, it's to wish there
were some way to take photos. My clunky camera—impossible to wield under
niqab
—is
in the car, and this place is my photographic wonderland: antique mart meets junkyard
meets unregulated zoo. The clashes are incredible. The clashes are so Cairo. And my pho-
tographer fantasy—invisibility—is all but granted here. I'm free to stare, to focus, ogle,
dawdle—tortured to have all those new powers but not my camera.
Powerless to capture the
souq
, I ask it questions. I ask this
souq
the same question I ask
all public places in Cairo: where have you hidden the women? And because there are things
thatqualifyasgirlyhere—pinkberetsandfloralperfumes—Ifeelmoreentitled thanusualto
ask my stubborn, Western question. A grizzly looking man walks by with a rack of little girl
dresses slung over his shoulder, and I let the clash—lace against stubble—amuse me. And
over by the table of ladies' underwear, a few male buyers stand perfectly still, riddled with
indecision (what color? what size? good lord, what cut?). I stare at their unmoving profiles
and want to freeze them, right there, in a perpetual puzzle involving women's underpants,
until they agree wives should be let out of homes.
There's a place, a kind of vortex at the Friday
souq
, where six different mud paths intersect.
Bird vendors meet jean sellers meet spice men meet fish delivery boys meet two blond im-
posters under
niqab
, who sooner or later, like it or not, must enter the vortex. It's impossible
to know how trafficked the vortex is until you're down in it—yes, “down,” for the vortex is
