Report from the Mideast: A human drama
Cairo
Still they say: ‘When there is peace . . .’
It is the joy of a visit here that just when you think you must cry for its troubles, this city will teach you to laugh. It is the sorrow of all who know it that just when you have learned to laugh, Cairo will show you more reasons to cry.
Peace is now the dream of Cairo, peace and reconstruction and prosperity for all. Shall we laugh with the Cairenes for the unexpected joy? Or shall we cry for the hopes, the millions of hopes, that peace will not fulfill?
It is dusk now, in the City of the Dead, in the eastern quarter, where the tombs of Egyptians great and humble stretch on for miles to the base of the bare, dusty Moqattam hills. The call to evening prayers echoes from a mosque off the marble walls.
To the south, the garbage pickers' fires send columns of smoke, black and thick, into the dull orange sky. It looks as if the gates of hell were moved to the cemetery wall to be close to these hundreds of thousands of souls.
And then, in the half-light, there is the form of a child at play, darting around the edge of a tomb. From beyond comes the sound of a mother calling her young ones in. Two donkey carts creak by, their drivers asleep. The donkeys know the way, because this is home.
The donkeys and their drivers, the mothers and their young, are some of the thousands who live in the City of the Dead. The crypts and the tombs for Egyptians of another age have provided homes for uncounted Cairenes for the last 30 years.
In that time Cairo's population has grown from 2 million to 9 million. But Cairo itself has not grown so much as it has bulged. It is now, for the most part, an overburdened slum, with some living on the dead and more living on the living.
Old apartment houses hold families of eight in single rooms. New tenants are forced to live in sheds erected on the apartment house roofs. Last fall two Cairo buildings simply collapsed, and 55 people died.
One cemetery in the shadow of the 800-year-old Citadel attracted so many of the living that the government of Anwar Sadat was forced to build a post office and four schools there.
On a recent night, President Sadat was traveling to Ismailia on the Suez Canal for a peace talk with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel. In the City of the Dead, the hopes of the living went with him.
"God preserve the president," said Saadallah Biumi, in front of the tomb that serves as his home and workshop. He was winding off his wooden wheel the last of the rope he would spin that day. His 13-year-old apprentice, Mohamed Kinawi, ran with one end of the rope down the row of graves, leaping in a zig-zag over piles of rock.
"The president cares for the people's children," said Saadallah Biumi, spinning his wheel. "He knows we can afford no more war and destruction.
"Perhaps when there is peace, in-sh-Allah, we will have houses for all."
"When there is peace, in-sh-Allah, if God wills..."
It is a refrain so familiar it sounds like a prayer.
When there is peace, there will be houses; when there is peace, there will be more buses; when there is peace, the telephones will be made to work; when there is peace, the water will run throughout the day...
When there is peace, in-sh-Allah.
In a Cairo cafe, Mamdouh Soliman, a travel agent, said that the end of war was the key to economic development.
