It was November and I had to get the train upriver. My mind was set. For a week, I’d spent each day until closing in the Cairo Museum. Then, I would cross the big square to the library of the American University in Cairo, where I occupied the late afternoons by reading about what I had seen in that dusty, dim, overwhelming museum. For a culture as old as the Egyptian, a week of study is nothing, but I was running out of money, and this trip upriver was either now or never. I wanted to get to Luxor and maybe Aswan. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Having graduated from Fordham a year and a half before, and looking eighteen, even though my student ID was expired, I could still pretend to be a student. I was living in the Cairo Youth Hostel, a story unto itself and better left for another time. The hostel was a fair trek from the museum and I maneuvered myself through the streets with the confidence of a New Yorker formerly comfortable on the streets of the Bronx of the 1970’s.

Cairo was under strain and overcrowded with a million refugees from the Israeli wars – the Six Day War in 1967, during which Egypt lost the Sinai, and the Yom Kipper War (1973), wherein Israel reached to within 60 miles of Cairo – a million refugees living on the sidewalks in tents and canvas shelters, whole families, mothers and children, cooking their evening meals on small propane stoves, sleeping on the concrete. A city not quite fully designed for seven million people was occupied by eight million, and these tensions were never relieved until Carter’s Camp David Accords, and maybe not even then. Unfinished construction projects remained comatose in their broken forms, and people threw their wastewater into ditches once meant for progress. Whole blocks of high-rise apartments stood akimbo in the dim light of streetlamps, the shoddy work damaged by the slightest earth tremors, the army preventing people from sleeping in the empty, dangerous apartments. Better off in a tent. And bread carriers, men with trays stacked with the loaves of bread they carried through the city, carried what was once individually, neatly wrapped loaves, now carried unwrapped bread on their shoulders, on trays open to the dust and wind of the streets.

Arrogantly informed by my youth, I went to the train station to buy a ticket south. My finances were limited. I knew, after my Egyptian immersion, if I could get to Israel, I could live for months on a kibbutz and work there as a volunteer and extend my voyage. But there was no direct link between Egypt and Israel. I might be able to get there through Jordan. I held back enough money for a plane ticket from Cairo to Ammon. Like an accountant, in advance, I parsed out my backsheesh. But first, I would venture upriver, up the Nile, south, into the real Egypt of Pharaohs and farmers. At the ticket window, when I presented my student ID for the discount, the teller noticed it was expired. I protested. He sent me to the ticket master.

The ticket master had his own office with his name on the door in gold lettering like any office of the day, and he sat behind a large desk, probably of English oak, a holdover from those colonial days, and on the desk a photo of a child. Behind him on the wall were maps and a bookcase full of folders and schedules. The door was open, and I knocked on the wood surrounding the glass with his name. He looked up. “Yes?”

I told him my story and he was unimpressed and said, “But you are no longer a student?”

“Not in a matriculated sense,” I ventured.
“Well then I cannot help you,” he said in dismissal.

“But…” I began.

“No.”

The next day I found myself heading to his office again. He was surprised but offered me a seat. I explained. He listened. He said, “If you go to your consulate and get a statement from them that you are still a student, I will issue you your pass.”

I had to think for a minute. I knew the consulate would be useless and so I said, “But the consulate is closed today, Veteren’s Day.” I had no idea if it was closed or not, but I gave it a shot.

“Then I cannot help you,” he said firmly.

That walk back to the youth hostel, I remembered something, and when I got to the hostel, I dug out my knapsack and in it was the small leather pouch my mother had given me, with a zipper, partly torn, and of beautiful brown leather like a small pocketbook. I kept a few things in it, sometimes my passport and other papers, and I remembered a letter I had the dean write for me back before my junior year abroad. I had the dean write a sort of letter of introduction, something I could present to people within my oddly formed romantic notion of the world, something I must have gotten somewhere from a novel sometime, or T. E. Lawrence. That this was the way you did things.

The third day, when he saw me enter his office, the ticket master threw his arms out wide, like the length of his desk, and he said angrily, “What? Have I done something wrong?”

With that I knew he was the kind of man that was just trying to make it right, trying not make any mistakes that might justify his removal, or any change in the status quo, and this gave me hope.

“No, no you have done nothing wrong,” I assured him. “You have done everything right.”

I handed him the crisp, cream colored envelope of high-quality paper with the embossed seal of the university in the upper lefthand corner, and the lettering and the seal in blood-red ink, like the blood of Christ, and he took out the letter, the first person to touch the paper since the dean put it there years ago, and he began to read.

I could see the red and gold seal of the university embossed on the letter paper too, and the ticket master began to read: “To whom it may concern: I hereby request the reader of this missive to grant and secure safe passage, and to provide whatever resources may be required by the bearer, R…, student and emissary for this university, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Signed, Dean J. McMann.

Of course, the ticket master was not a catholic and neither was I, nor had either of us ever been one, nor even Christian, but without comment he refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope, and with no comment, just a look, and a shake of his head, stamped the document required for me to continue in my dream.

What happened the next day, I have forever regretted.