The Great Cairene Saloon Series/Dog Days at Hamed's
Jeffrey, Terence P.
THE GREAT CAIRENE SALOON SERIES DOG DAYS AT HAMED'S Thursday is Cairo's Friday, when the Marine barracks within the high-walled compound of the U.S. Embassy is transformed into an Animal House...
...Within it, beneath a brown burlap blanket, amidst whatever ice could be found, rested the establishment's inventory of Stella, Egypt's official beer...
...But Hamed's principal architectural feature was a red-steel, top-loaded, vintage 1952 Coca-Cola cooler...
...We were both still wiping the dog's mud away when we reached the far end of the span and became aware of a malodorous mist descending from above...
...With only a twitch of warning, the creature began violently shaking his hind quarters...
...Stella isthe nationalized brewery of Egypt, and the beer is served everywhere in dingy brown half-liter bottles...
...Ya, Hussein," he said to his male nurse...
...I don't think you would want to get bitten by him...
...My Canadian friend Andy lived on the other side of "the island" in a neighborhood called "the engineers...
...It's not hepatitis...
...That can't be true...
...America is for Americans, Egypt for Egyptians...
...We finished our beers...
...Year-abroad Harvardians and Berkeleyites, hemorrhaging hearts from the Catholic Relief Agency (most of whom, strangely, are Episcopalians), and the not-yet-married daughters of the Egyptian aristocracy mix amiably with beer-chugging, burger-flipping, zipper-headed, ZZ Top-blasting, 19-year-old American warriors...
...This one was a four-lane overpass that would connect Cairo with an island in the Nile called al-Gezira...
...A boy of no more than nine swung over to our table...
...Birra...
...The old man fished for the Stellas...
...His legs dragged behind him like an afterthought...
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...You know how you can tell if it's hepatitis...
...That Thursday I coaxed a Canadian diplomat, a classmate from my Arabic language program at the American University, to join me at Hamed's...
...As if in response, the dog stood up and yawned...
...Unbidden, the boy brought us two more...
...I am...
...He opened the beers in two quick flips and set them on the table...
...Embassy is transformed into an Animal House with M-16s...
...Neither Hamed, the old man by the cooler, nor any of the construction workers paid him much attention...
...He was crippled...
...His wrists were fitted with leather stirrups, which came over his knuckles to fit his fingertips like gloves...
...He set down his beaker...
...Couldn't resist coming here at least once for a beer...
...Rabies is apparently so endemic here that the dogs who get it have developed a relative immunity...
...I avoided the embassy parties and the American hotels and bars, until my romance with unadulterated Arabism was brought low, and very nearly extinguished, by a neverto-be-taxonomized gastrointestinal parasite...
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...His body was bent somewhere below the waist, at which juncture he was supported by a leather sled suspended from his shoulders...
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...There was only a slight glimmer of sunset behind the Giza skyline as Andyand I left Hamed's...
...Can't say I have...
...Its front wall was a Schweppes Orange Soda billboard, its side wall a crumbling twelfth-century mosque...
...The other English-speaking embassies have their own intramural fun...
...His every step seemed pained, rheumatic...
...The old man turned on a blackby 'Terence P. Jeffrey and-white TV that sat on a folding metal chair...
...I hope that's not sewage...
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...I asked Andy...
...TWo," I said...
...I was heading home to "the apartments," Andy back to "the engineers...
...You ever been here before...
...Editor's Choice Award UnionSquareware 27 St Mary's Court, Brookline, MA02146 Telephone 617-277-9222 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 31 ble and plopped down into the mud...
...La...
...He swung back to the cooler...
...I lived on "the island" in an apartment building called "the apartments...
...They tend to get arthritic and slow and linger that way for a long time—until some other rabid dog does them in or they just waste away...
...Amreeki...
...Thirty feet up, a two-foot-wide pipe was suspended from the girders, hissing out a jet of fluid...
...Not even in Cairo," I said, "would they build an elevated sewer line...
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...I've been walking by it all week," I said...
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...TWo Americans," the Egyptian said, dismissing us with a wave of his hand...
...one of them said...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991...
...The dog began rubbing its posterior back and forth in the mud...
...I said, gesturing to the dog, who was still rubbing his haunches in the mud...
...H amed's—as we later came to call it, after the little boy who waited tables there—was an al fresco establishment...
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...A sad-eyed, tongue-dragging dog crept into the bar...
...Andy and I took a table behind the largest puddle...
...The other two sides were formed by a mountain of every conceivable sort of junk, from Pharaonic rubble to Pirelli tires...
...We crossed the Corniche to the old, cantilevered 26 July Bridge, which stood in the shadow of the concrete monstrosity the boys in Hamed's were building...
...That's what they told us at the embassy...
...It's hepatitis when it foams yellow," the doctor mumbled through his sandwich...
...beads...
...As Andy and I arrived, the old man who ran the place was splashing down the dirt floor with a bucket of Nile water...
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...Andy and I drank in silence as the sun slipped below the Schweppes sign and the workers began shuffling into the bar...
...T he next morning I awoke feeling 1 as if a hummingbird were hovering in my stomach...
...the others idled at Hamed's polishing off a few cold ones...
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...Tvvo tired and leathery men in dirty gelabiyyas took the table next to ours...
...Polio," Andy remarked under his breath...
...He and Hussein were stumped...
...The men at the table next to ours nearly tumbled into the muck with him for joy...
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...The boy looked at us...
...he asked...
...You know," said Andy, "eighty percent of the dogs in Cairo are rabid...
...The dog yawned again and squatted back into the puddle...
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...One of the men turned and spoke...
...He made his way slowly to the puddle beside our taResearchers, Writers...
...The dog is a patriot...
...This was a common housekeeping trick around Cairo—not only in places like Hamed's, which really had a dirt floor, but also in finer establishments, where the marble, alabaster, or hardwood had been overlaid with strata of windblown Sahara...
...But by my second Thursday in town I was too good for all that...
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...Most of the road crew had come from Nubia (southernmost Egypt) for the job, and slept in lean-tos on the riverbank directly opposite Hamed's front door...
...He cordially took a urine sample in a funnel-shaped quart beaker, which he swirled over his head as he chomped on a bean curd and pita sandwich...
...My friend's Canadian...
...I had moved to Cairo in the fall of 1984 with a purpose—to imbibe only the purest nectar of Egyptian culture...
...This is Egypt," said the other...
...You wouldn't be likely to," said Andy...
...Mud and dog hair splattered everywhere, but especially in our faces...
...I caught the doctor in the middle of lunch...
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...He propelled himself by pivoting from one gloved fist to the other...
...The boy slung two of them under his arm and swiveled back our way...
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...They were divided into two theological camps: half spent the evenings prostrating themselves toward Mecca and polishing a gloss into their prayer Terence P. Jeffrey is an editorial writer at the Washington Times...
...Hamed's stood on the Corniche, across the street from one of those never-to-be-completed highway projects found only in the Third World and certain parts of the northeastern United States...
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...In Arabic, al-Gezira means "the island...
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...But I haven't seen any dogs foaming at the mouth or chasing people through the streets...
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...Five days later, during a brief respite from the stomach-grinding and flash fevers, I staggered to the clinic at the American University...
...They prescribed bottled water, canned food, and an airplane trip to the United States if I felt strong enough to make it to the airport...
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Vol. 24 • September 1991 • No. 9
