After the long walk along the Nile I arrived at the hostel. An old man, in a white jellaba led me through a warren of rooms. He had a greying beard and was a little portly. “There is a place,” he assured me, “only one pound.” The Egyptian pound was pegged one to one with the British pound in those days. Still, it was very cheap.
I just didn’t remember coming here before visiting Uncle Vartan.
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The beds we passed were all pressed together, but they were also all occupied.
The old man insisted on showing me the shower room, so we walked through it, passing by the stalls, their thin plastic curtains pulled open. The men’s shower room was separate from the women’s, he said. We passed a man standing naked under the shower head of a double stall, his fat belly and small penis exposed. He was oblivious to my looking at him, yet he turned to face the blue tiles, and we kept on going. Under the shower head next to him, another man stood, his back already turned towards us, his bottom saggy and pale.
The bedrooms were large, they had high ceilings, all of them were packed with beds and we had to weave our way between the beds to get to the next room. I couldn’t see where I would get to sleep.
But the last bedroom, with its French windows open and its lovely view out onto the Mediterranean was better. The sea was a perfect blue from the window, like a TV advert, and a young couple lay in the bed under the window sill. They looked at me sheepishly, as if they knew they should be out of bed already, and they twisted up and out from under the sheets. They were naked, their thin limbs all angles, as their feet searched the cold of the floor tile.
Towards the back of the room, there were another two beds, doubles. But again there was a young couple there, lying perpendicular, across both beds and they were pressed together, face up. They held their arms by their side, their legs were bolt straight like two shabtis, and they were naked on top of the sheets.
They looked irritated at having been disturbed.
The old man told me I could sleep on their bed, lie in the gap between them and the headboard.
I sleep there as well, at the foot of the bed, there is enough space for both of us, he said, but I could not see how that would be anything but tight.
Photo by Donald Trung via WikiMedia Commons.
