Cairo with Osama

Author's Note: This piece is the product of an assignment to write a complete piece strictly within a fifty-minute increment without an outline or any editing or anything more than a prompt for a topic. The prompt was to write about an encounter with a stranger. You can see how little someone can actually get done in fifty minutes.

His colleague had driven us from the border between Egypt and Israel through the Sinai Desert, as in some reverse exodus. We had taken the midnight bus from Tel Aviv to the border and it was now 6 a.m., so Jason and I felt the entire desert solely on our tongues as we nodded our heads in a flux of open-mouthed hypnogogic half-sleep for the six hours drive. We awoke only at military checkpoints on the highway which disturbed the leisure of the travel nearly as frequently as the bits of the driver’s cigarette ash did as they suctioned back, onto our red and unshaven cheeks, ushered by the air shooting through the window. The driver also picked up a friend at the border who was not part of our journey and knew us only from the top of our necks in our respective rows in the van.

Osama met us at the Egypt Museum. We did not know his name would be that and we just kind of nodded as Osama tiptoed through an awkward disposition about the frequency of his name in the Muslim world. This was known to us and still strange.

In the museum, he took us through the bounty of Tutankhamen, an ancient Pharaoh who apparently died young. All the characters and figures and symbols in the tapestries were explained to us eloquently although the jokes Osama made were stale leftovers from the late 1990s; we appreciated all of the antiquities.

History has never touched me. I’ve never been concerned with anything older than I found accessible to me, even books in archaic English I automatically equate with erudition beyond my curiosity. In the crowded, disorganized place where the spoils line the covers and inserts of textbooks I’ve encountered since middle school, I felt small and grateful.

Osama took us to a church where Jesus had lived for a few months and Jason crossed himself. Jason was a Jew and did not want Osama to know. Osama took us to an old Jewish synagogue, and after effectively downplaying the number of Jews expelled from the country after Egypt’s first war with Israel in 1948, Osama suggestively offered some extra time for us to reflect and take pictures. Jason hurried. As we left, the sky was getting dark and an Egyptian beggar in the alleys called out Shabbat Shalom! to Jason’s nose. It was only Thursday.

Jason’s ambivalence was my fault. In addition to admonishing him against the prospects of women for us in Cairo, I had made note of the rough patch of skin on Osama’s forehead. I explained that when more religious (read: zealous and irrationally anti-Semitic) Muslims pray, along the course of five times a day, the skin of their foreheads rub against their prayer rugs during the supplications and produce a constantly renewed irritation. After this, Jason began to point people with this devotional signature as we passed more people on the streets of Cairo. I don’t know why I do things like this to my friends.