Sleepy puppy unconsciously burrowing closer to my left buttcheek? Check.
A good spy thriller? Check.
Comfy Brooklyn sweatshirt? Check (thanks Uncle Charlie!).
Cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake DELIVERED TO MY DOOR? Check!
It is pretty much a perfect Friday afternoon. The maid (who lives downstairs) failed to show up for the third time last night (think we’re getting a new maid) so Marisol and I cleaned the apartment. Not really well, since we’ll eventually get a pro in here but well enough that I’m not cringing every time I put my foot down on something dusty or squishy or something that used to be a delivery menu I wanted to use but is now a pile of tiny pieces of paper covered in puppy saliva. Marisol swept (and I’m considering mopping tonight as well, I know, big plans!) while I de-slimed the stovetop and washed every dish and stick of silverware we own. So I can get into the kitchen now, though I haven’t gone grocery shopping this week there is really no need. Nothing to cook.
It might have to stay that way until tomorrow to. Today is the Prophet’s birthday so it is an official government and religious holiday weekend. Not many stores are open. I have errands to run besides the grocery shopping. My brother is coming to visit in a couple weeks and I need to pick up a mattress and a phone for him to use while he’s here. Also, I promised myself a bookshelf after payday as a reward for getting through the month.
There have been big shakeups at my office in the last few weeks so it has been a difficult month. I think I absorb more ambient stress than I realize because even though I don’t really know the people involved it was still really difficult to concentrate on my work. I went from reading an average of 220 letters a day to struggling to make 100. It is better now. One of our senior attorneys left the firm and left the LAW to follow a more spiritual path of studying reiki and teaching yoga. She did this after centering our entire correspondence review procedure around the way her mind needed it to work in order to process the information and draft our Statement of Claim, the central document we will submit explaining our client’s case. I’m glad she’s off to do something that will hopefully be really fulfilling and, after less than two months in a firm I can definitely understand how you could run yourself into the ground doing this for a lifetime, but since the whole system of information gathering was set up under the assumption that she was writing the SOC, she is kind of leaving us in the lurch.
We have rallied surprisingly well. She was only my supervisor for a week so I never experienced this but rumor has it she could be moody and, though a good teacher and friend when in a good mood, she could be unkind and somewhat maniacally ruthless in a bad mood. The tension in the office now that she is gone has palpably decreased. The other senior attorney working on the case has less management experience but he has definitely rallied. There was another scare last week when he had to leave for Canada for the whole week on emergency family leave but he is back and seems to be solidly picking up the slack where the other attorney left off. It is a little terrifying to feel so unprepared for what is coming when we finish the correspondence review in the next couple weeks, but also exciting because we will all get to do the kind of work we normally wouldn’t get to do until after we’d been at the firm for a year or so.
I am learning a lot more about how construction contracts work, which is a good thing, because it helps me do my job better and feel more invested in the work of the firm, but it is also a bad thing, since I honestly don’t really care how construction contracts work beyond the barest veneer of purely academic interest. In my soul, I am not a construction lawyer.
I am starting to wonder if in my soul I am a lawyer at all. I had an annoying conversation last night with a woman I work with that has picked open this old question in my brain that I thought had finally scarred over after I found happy employment and now it is festering again. She is incredibly smart and very intense about her work. Her brightest dream is to become an arbitrator of the highest degree and sit down with a cup of coffee to pour over two brilliantly written claims and determine who is right and what they are entitled to under the law. When she talks about the day she will get to do this, her eyes light up with actual joy at the thought of reading legal arguments. My eyes glaze over.
Anyway, she gave me a ride home last night during the biggest, longest thundering rainstorm I have seen since I’ve been in Cairo. Supposedly it actually HAILED out in Maadi, a neighborhood about 30 minutes away. People actually emailed the listserve about it in wonder. In my neighborhood it was just rain but since Cairo never gets rain there aren’t really any street gutters to speak of so the streets fill with deep puddles that run for ten, even fifteen yards and cover the entire width of the street. Cars that roll in too quickly or too slowly can lose traction and float a few feet before drifting to the other side and since no one knows how to drive in the rain this was happening everywhere last night. Also, it is not typical to drive with your headlights on in Cairo and windshield wipers are decorative only so most cars didn’t have the kind of visibility you want them to have so you can sprint across the street in your flip flops and reach the sidewalk alive. Weaving among the drifting cars and soaked Cairenes, my friend asked me when I knew I wanted to be a lawyer and I said I still don’t know that for sure, which is the wrong answer to give to someone who is so passionate about the law herself and someone, I forgot to mention, who is the WIFE OF MY BOSS, the lawyer who started the firm and hired me back in November.
Oh well, if she ever decides to rat me out for my wavering commitment, I can always spread the word to our coworkers that she called our boss something that sounded like “schnooky mouse” on the phone.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
"Malesh" indeed
Crazy Landlady Saga Part Two:
As I jokingly predicted in my last post, I really did wind up spending most of the evening of January 30th sitting on an island of my belongings outside our former apartment holding my roommate’s dog while the landlady, her sister (who, it bears noting, we had never even met before this) and her “lawyer” (the patent licensing neighbor from downstairs) screamed their heads off at my roommate and her boyfriend (not at me because I was holding the cute puppy and wouldn’t have understood them anyway) and the police stood around looking like they might be getting migraines from the shock of it all.
They day before, we thought we had finally struck a deal, not a very good one for ourselves, but one that would allow us to leave with over half our deposit and the feeling that we’d stuck up for ourselves at least a little bit. The landlady had eventually offered half our deposit back, or 1750LE (around $350), when we owed her at most 700LE for a new mattress they’d bought for the girl who had my room before me that wasn’t written into the contract and for some air conditioning repairs. Her son called us separately and said he would fork over another 250LE from his own pocket just to smooth things over with us because he didn’t want the relationship to end badly. We didn’t care how the relationship ended, we just wanted it over and us out so we agreed to take the 2000LE and be out by the night of the 30th, giving them an extra day to show the apartment (because we had been refusing to let them in to show it while we were still there and while they were still insisting on keeping our full deposit). We didn’t trust them at all that this deal would stick, however, so we were clear that the movers were coming at 6pm on the 30th, (a Saturday, and therefore a week night since Sunday is the first day of the workweek here) to start packing up our stuff and so we needed the money before 6pm or the deal was off.
Sure enough, the landlady showed up at 5:15, practically threw the 2000LE at us and then crossed her arms and sat down on the couch in a huff and announced she was going to stay there until we moved out at 6. We explained that although the movers were coming at 6, it would take them a couple hours to pack up our stuff and since trucks aren’t allowed into my neighborhood until after 8, we wouldn’t actually be leaving the apartment for a few more hours yet. She huffed a little and when it seemed she really was going to sit there for three hours we couldn’t figure out what she wanted. At first we suggested she check the apartment to assure herself we were actually moving and that we weren’t stealing any of her hideous gold-painted furniture. She sniffed indignantly that she didn’t want to check the apartment, which didn’t surprise us since she’d kept so much of our money that even if we’d taken the walls with us when we left she could have had them rebuilt and still had cash (our cash!) to spare. So then we offered to give her our keys right then, since we already had our deposit (what we were getting of it), and then she could go home knowing that even if we reneged on the deal she could get into the apartment to get us out.
This was acceptable and we handed her our two keys (and didn’t mention the third we’d had made as an extra – we’re not stupid and we knew by then these people were not to be trusted). She was on her way out when she decided she DID want to check the apartment. We said of course, check away, then immediately called Marisol’s boyfriend, Maged, to come help us because we knew at that moment she was going to try to get more money.
The landlady started walking around jiggling loose drawers (all drawers are loose in Egypt), turning on light switches, and generally frowning and clucking and shaking her head in feigned dismay. Sure enough, she soon discovered the remote control for the air conditioning in my bedroom had stopped working sometime since the last time I used it in early October. There also wasn’t a remote for the AC in the living room, though the remote for the one in Marisol’s bedroom was the same brand and we’d always just used that one to set the temperature, then turned the AC on and off with the wall power switch. The landlady demanded another thousand pounds ($200) to replace the broken and missing air conditioner. Marisol told her we would walk down to Radio Shack ourselves and replace them and the landlady, a little disappointed we weren’t fighting with her on this, gave us one of our keys back and huffed back to her apartment.
Unfortunately, Radio Shack didn’t have any universal remotes that would work for air conditioners. They said we’d have to go to the tech mall downtown, which was at least a half hour drive in a taxi both ways. Since the Radio Shack manager said they would only cost 50LE maximum ($10) each, and the landlady already had so much of our money, we decided to go home and finish packing instead. The movers, three big, fairly uneducated but generally polite guys showed and started taping our stuff into boxes. I had carried my own things the two blocks to our new place earlier that day but Marisol’s stuff and all our kitchen things and three pieces of furniture were still in the apartment and needed to be packed, taped into boxes, carried down 16 flights of stairs (only some of it would fit in the elevator, not things like Marisol’s treadmill), packed into a truck that would come at 8, then driven to the new apartment and carried up another six flights of stairs and packed into the new living room. As they got to work, the landlady came back to see her new remote controls. We told her what Radio Shack had said, and that they would only cost 50LE and not 500LE each, as she’d estimated, but that we weren’t going to go downtown to get them and that she could check back with Radio Shack in a few days to see if they’d restocked.
The landlady promptly lost her shit. She started screaming at Marisol that she had given us our deposit back in good faith (she’d forgotten the half she was keeping for herself for no reason) and this was how we were treating her, etc. etc. Marisol was still packing and not really paying attention to this batshit screaming lady in her room but the shrill light fixture rupturing volume of it was upsetting the dog AND ME so I called Maged again only to find out he was still fifteen minutes away (normally when an Egyptian says “fifteen minutes” it means an hour but this time it turned out to be two hours because of traffic).
The movers were horrified. They picked up their pace significantly and, as a result of this stressful environment, they wound up packing an open carton of milk (milk comes in a box here and although some brands have a plastic flip top, the smaller boxes I use for coffee creamer are all cardboard and you make a little snip in the corner to pour) into the packing box with Marisol’s food from the fridge (yes, they even pack your vegetables!) and I spent a half hour at 1:30 in the morning rinsing milk off rotten eggplant and carrots because of course Marisol hadn’t cleaned the fridge before the guys had packed it so they packed everything, edible or not. When we told them the landlady already had 1500LE of our deposit and wanted more, they made the Egyptian equivalent of the finger spiraling “she’s crazy” loops beside their heads to say this was not normal behavior. They kept telling us not all Egyptians were like this and when Maged finally showed up, they told him how glad they were that we had someone to stick up for us in Arabic because we seemed like nice people.
They charged us about twice what moving should have cost but we couldn’t really blame them because they had to take a three hour break in the middle of their job when the landlady started physically blocking them from taking boxes out of our apartment. That’s about when she called her sister and the lawyer. Then everyone was there to scream at us and scream at the movers (who got everything into the hallway outside the apartment, but were too intimidated by the screaming to start taking it downstairs until the situation was resolved), and generally bring the moving process to a standstill. Maged still hadn’t arrived, Marisol had started to say some pretty rude things in response to the repeated screaming in her face, and the puppy was literally trembling in my arms.
My proudest moment, and really the only contribution I made at all, was when the landlady triumphantly told the lawyer that we had broken the air conditioning in the living room. He was holding the two remotes, the broken one for my room and the functional one from Marisol’s room. I noticed the power switch was on for the living room AC and I asked in Arabic “you said it’s broken?” And she said “well, I can’t turn it on so how do I know it isn’t broken?” And I gestured to the remote from Marisol’s room in the lawyer’s hand and mimed hitting Power. The lawyer, who typically alternated between yelling at us, demanding money, and telling his “client” not to swear and scream at Marisol in front of witnesses because swearing can be a criminal offense here aimed the remote at the air conditioner in front of me, Marisol, the landlady, her crazy sister, and all the movers (who all heard her claim it was broken) and voila the AC purred to life, all the buttons on the front lit up in green for Go to hell. The lawyer quickly turned the AC off and didn’t turn it on again the whole night.
Maged called around nine thirty to say he was almost there and that he had called the police and they were on their way and Marisol and I picked up our purses, the only things of ours left in the apartment and walked out the door without saying anything to each other or anyone. Inside the apartment, the argument could be made that we were trespassing (even though since it was still January, we were technically still legally tenants, having paid rent) but outside the apartment, and with not a sliver of our belongings inside, we were legally in the clear.
Shortly after the police arrived, I retired to the staircase with the puppy, who had by that time been in my arms for hours and was thoroughly traumatized. Not speaking Arabic, I had done all I could by showing my American passport and quietly asking the junior officer if I should call my embassy (of course he said no, but I spent a few minutes after that speaking earnestly to no one on the phone just to make him nervous). I called my friend and she and her roommate did us a huge favor by coming to pick up the dog and take her to the new apartment so she could have some peace, I could have the use of my arms again, and so we wouldn’t run the risk of her peeing on something and costing us another 1000LE.
The police did basically nothing for about four hours. They pinched the bridges of their noses, they rubbed their temples, they asked the lawyer to ask his client and her sister to stop screaming, they told Maged they wanted to hear our story directly from Marisol and I but they didn’t speak English well and we couldn’t get out more than a sentence or two before the lawyer would shout over us (and into our abused eardrums). Eventually we stopped trying and let the Egyptians yell at each other. The landlady kept demanding 1000LE to replace the air conditioner remotes, we kept repeating in hoarse whispers that she wasn’t asking for only 1000LE, but rather 1000LE MORE since she’d already kept 800LE from our deposit that she had no right to, and Maged kept speaking to the senior officer and the lawyer in a reasonable, if tense, tone, to try to work out a deal. The officer at one point offered 200LE from his own pocket to resolve the issue but the landlady said she wanted US to pay and that it wasn’t enough.
The most frustrating thing to me is that there wasn’t actually anything stopping us from leaving except that the movers wouldn’t take the stuff downstairs. They were legally allowed to. It was our stuff and we were outside the apartment. Our belongings weren’t in dispute. But the landlady would scream at the movers whenever they tried to move a box and the police declined to clarify to these poor confused guys that they had every right to take the stuff downstairs. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe us, but they were scared, and eventually went downstairs to smoke and hang out where there were fewer hysterical women.
If we could have filed a police report, we could have legally stayed in the apartment until the case went to court (usually around three months) without paying a cent in rent and we likely would have won because the landlady’s behavior was so out of proportion and because she’d already kept so much of our money. But to file a police report, we would have had to go to the police station. And to go to the police station, we would have had to leave our stuff in the hallway. The landlady had already made a move to grab one of our rolling suitcases and force it past Marisol back into the apartment just before the police arrived (because of the rule that if we had anything in the apartment we could be considered trespassing). This wasn’t just to boost her argument for when the police arrived. She still thought we didn’t have a key to the apartment anymore so by moving our bags inside, she thought she could locking them in and us out if worse came to worse. Marisol had to literally tear bag out of her hands. So we couldn’t leave our stuff to make a police report and the police would neither let us take them downstairs nor station an officer to watch them.
So our boxes stayed in the hallway and the fight ranged from around them to into the apartment and back again attracting the horrified and puzzled stares of our neighbors who kept telling us “malesh” which means, “I am sorry for you.” Because this was all very unusual and irrational behavior for Egyptians who generally appreciate the value of interpersonal relationship and will even sacrifice a good deal or something valuable to avoid grudges and part on good terms. This was why her son had offered the money from his own pocket to smooth things over with us. He and his sister showed up around 11:30 and had the same shocked and appalled faces as the neighbors and never said a word, just stood there like they were watching hyenas eat a baby.
Around 12:30am, I made a proposition to the police and to the lawyer. “I will give him 300LE,” I said, “not them,” gesturing to the screaming ladies, “him.” “Then tomorrow or the next day we will buy two air conditioning remotes. We’ll bring him the receipt proving they are only 50LE each and he will give me the change.” This was basically agreeable to all parties and although the lawyer wouldn’t sign anything to that effect, the senior police officer said that we had his word (and Maged said this was the equivalent of the officer promising to enforce the agreement on his honor) that the lawyer would abide by the terms of the deal, otherwise we could call him and he would come personally to sort it out. So I forked over the cash, and we called the movers back. While we waited for them, it was just us and the cops in the hallway for a little while with the door to our apartment closed and all the screaming stopped. The senior officer made the Egyptian symbol for “these people are absolutely batshit nuts” and told us not to think all Egyptians are like that. That one moment made me feel a little better about the whole experience, like this agreement from a person in authority somehow justified how attacked and outraged Marisol and I felt about the whole thing.
We were in our new apartment within the hour. By about 1:30am. And I had work in the morning.
Of course in the cold light of day we realized we’d rather use Ron Jeremy’s belly button as a cereal bowl for the rest of our lives than ever see any of those people ever again. So we just called the 300LE a loss (which means they wound up with $10 over half our original deposit) and never went to Radio Shack or called the lawyer back.
I have had two nightmares since that night in which the landlady tells the plumbers and carpenters in the neighborhood (both of which we need to do some maintenance and build some bookshelves in our new place) that we’re unscrupulous people and not to do business with us.
Our new landlord, Mr. Wagdi called a couple days ago on our landline. We use the landline only for the internet and have never given the number out and I swear when it rang we both had this irrational thought that somehow the old landlady had found us. We hesitated to answer but when Marisol picked up it was just the new landlord calling to make sure we were happy in the apartment, that we didn’t need anything, that we didn’t want someone to come and repaint (this thing about the repainting is an unheard of level of nice for an Egyptian landlord), and that he would call a handyman if we found any problems. He even asked her “how is your family in Mexico, praise God everyone is well.”
We feel very safe and happy here. Our oven and TV are huge and we have a microwave (only the fancy offices have microwaves in Egypt) and an espresso machine. Even the dog is calmer in this apartment…though she eats a lot of paint so I’m not sure her mood is an accurate yardstick of happiness.
In other news, I almost got run over by a cute guy in an SUV yesterday outside my office. He gunned his engine, then braked sharply when he saw me in the street to let me finish crossing. Closest thing I’ve had to a date since I’ve been in Cairo.
As I jokingly predicted in my last post, I really did wind up spending most of the evening of January 30th sitting on an island of my belongings outside our former apartment holding my roommate’s dog while the landlady, her sister (who, it bears noting, we had never even met before this) and her “lawyer” (the patent licensing neighbor from downstairs) screamed their heads off at my roommate and her boyfriend (not at me because I was holding the cute puppy and wouldn’t have understood them anyway) and the police stood around looking like they might be getting migraines from the shock of it all.
They day before, we thought we had finally struck a deal, not a very good one for ourselves, but one that would allow us to leave with over half our deposit and the feeling that we’d stuck up for ourselves at least a little bit. The landlady had eventually offered half our deposit back, or 1750LE (around $350), when we owed her at most 700LE for a new mattress they’d bought for the girl who had my room before me that wasn’t written into the contract and for some air conditioning repairs. Her son called us separately and said he would fork over another 250LE from his own pocket just to smooth things over with us because he didn’t want the relationship to end badly. We didn’t care how the relationship ended, we just wanted it over and us out so we agreed to take the 2000LE and be out by the night of the 30th, giving them an extra day to show the apartment (because we had been refusing to let them in to show it while we were still there and while they were still insisting on keeping our full deposit). We didn’t trust them at all that this deal would stick, however, so we were clear that the movers were coming at 6pm on the 30th, (a Saturday, and therefore a week night since Sunday is the first day of the workweek here) to start packing up our stuff and so we needed the money before 6pm or the deal was off.
Sure enough, the landlady showed up at 5:15, practically threw the 2000LE at us and then crossed her arms and sat down on the couch in a huff and announced she was going to stay there until we moved out at 6. We explained that although the movers were coming at 6, it would take them a couple hours to pack up our stuff and since trucks aren’t allowed into my neighborhood until after 8, we wouldn’t actually be leaving the apartment for a few more hours yet. She huffed a little and when it seemed she really was going to sit there for three hours we couldn’t figure out what she wanted. At first we suggested she check the apartment to assure herself we were actually moving and that we weren’t stealing any of her hideous gold-painted furniture. She sniffed indignantly that she didn’t want to check the apartment, which didn’t surprise us since she’d kept so much of our money that even if we’d taken the walls with us when we left she could have had them rebuilt and still had cash (our cash!) to spare. So then we offered to give her our keys right then, since we already had our deposit (what we were getting of it), and then she could go home knowing that even if we reneged on the deal she could get into the apartment to get us out.
This was acceptable and we handed her our two keys (and didn’t mention the third we’d had made as an extra – we’re not stupid and we knew by then these people were not to be trusted). She was on her way out when she decided she DID want to check the apartment. We said of course, check away, then immediately called Marisol’s boyfriend, Maged, to come help us because we knew at that moment she was going to try to get more money.
The landlady started walking around jiggling loose drawers (all drawers are loose in Egypt), turning on light switches, and generally frowning and clucking and shaking her head in feigned dismay. Sure enough, she soon discovered the remote control for the air conditioning in my bedroom had stopped working sometime since the last time I used it in early October. There also wasn’t a remote for the AC in the living room, though the remote for the one in Marisol’s bedroom was the same brand and we’d always just used that one to set the temperature, then turned the AC on and off with the wall power switch. The landlady demanded another thousand pounds ($200) to replace the broken and missing air conditioner. Marisol told her we would walk down to Radio Shack ourselves and replace them and the landlady, a little disappointed we weren’t fighting with her on this, gave us one of our keys back and huffed back to her apartment.
Unfortunately, Radio Shack didn’t have any universal remotes that would work for air conditioners. They said we’d have to go to the tech mall downtown, which was at least a half hour drive in a taxi both ways. Since the Radio Shack manager said they would only cost 50LE maximum ($10) each, and the landlady already had so much of our money, we decided to go home and finish packing instead. The movers, three big, fairly uneducated but generally polite guys showed and started taping our stuff into boxes. I had carried my own things the two blocks to our new place earlier that day but Marisol’s stuff and all our kitchen things and three pieces of furniture were still in the apartment and needed to be packed, taped into boxes, carried down 16 flights of stairs (only some of it would fit in the elevator, not things like Marisol’s treadmill), packed into a truck that would come at 8, then driven to the new apartment and carried up another six flights of stairs and packed into the new living room. As they got to work, the landlady came back to see her new remote controls. We told her what Radio Shack had said, and that they would only cost 50LE and not 500LE each, as she’d estimated, but that we weren’t going to go downtown to get them and that she could check back with Radio Shack in a few days to see if they’d restocked.
The landlady promptly lost her shit. She started screaming at Marisol that she had given us our deposit back in good faith (she’d forgotten the half she was keeping for herself for no reason) and this was how we were treating her, etc. etc. Marisol was still packing and not really paying attention to this batshit screaming lady in her room but the shrill light fixture rupturing volume of it was upsetting the dog AND ME so I called Maged again only to find out he was still fifteen minutes away (normally when an Egyptian says “fifteen minutes” it means an hour but this time it turned out to be two hours because of traffic).
The movers were horrified. They picked up their pace significantly and, as a result of this stressful environment, they wound up packing an open carton of milk (milk comes in a box here and although some brands have a plastic flip top, the smaller boxes I use for coffee creamer are all cardboard and you make a little snip in the corner to pour) into the packing box with Marisol’s food from the fridge (yes, they even pack your vegetables!) and I spent a half hour at 1:30 in the morning rinsing milk off rotten eggplant and carrots because of course Marisol hadn’t cleaned the fridge before the guys had packed it so they packed everything, edible or not. When we told them the landlady already had 1500LE of our deposit and wanted more, they made the Egyptian equivalent of the finger spiraling “she’s crazy” loops beside their heads to say this was not normal behavior. They kept telling us not all Egyptians were like this and when Maged finally showed up, they told him how glad they were that we had someone to stick up for us in Arabic because we seemed like nice people.
They charged us about twice what moving should have cost but we couldn’t really blame them because they had to take a three hour break in the middle of their job when the landlady started physically blocking them from taking boxes out of our apartment. That’s about when she called her sister and the lawyer. Then everyone was there to scream at us and scream at the movers (who got everything into the hallway outside the apartment, but were too intimidated by the screaming to start taking it downstairs until the situation was resolved), and generally bring the moving process to a standstill. Maged still hadn’t arrived, Marisol had started to say some pretty rude things in response to the repeated screaming in her face, and the puppy was literally trembling in my arms.
My proudest moment, and really the only contribution I made at all, was when the landlady triumphantly told the lawyer that we had broken the air conditioning in the living room. He was holding the two remotes, the broken one for my room and the functional one from Marisol’s room. I noticed the power switch was on for the living room AC and I asked in Arabic “you said it’s broken?” And she said “well, I can’t turn it on so how do I know it isn’t broken?” And I gestured to the remote from Marisol’s room in the lawyer’s hand and mimed hitting Power. The lawyer, who typically alternated between yelling at us, demanding money, and telling his “client” not to swear and scream at Marisol in front of witnesses because swearing can be a criminal offense here aimed the remote at the air conditioner in front of me, Marisol, the landlady, her crazy sister, and all the movers (who all heard her claim it was broken) and voila the AC purred to life, all the buttons on the front lit up in green for Go to hell. The lawyer quickly turned the AC off and didn’t turn it on again the whole night.
Maged called around nine thirty to say he was almost there and that he had called the police and they were on their way and Marisol and I picked up our purses, the only things of ours left in the apartment and walked out the door without saying anything to each other or anyone. Inside the apartment, the argument could be made that we were trespassing (even though since it was still January, we were technically still legally tenants, having paid rent) but outside the apartment, and with not a sliver of our belongings inside, we were legally in the clear.
Shortly after the police arrived, I retired to the staircase with the puppy, who had by that time been in my arms for hours and was thoroughly traumatized. Not speaking Arabic, I had done all I could by showing my American passport and quietly asking the junior officer if I should call my embassy (of course he said no, but I spent a few minutes after that speaking earnestly to no one on the phone just to make him nervous). I called my friend and she and her roommate did us a huge favor by coming to pick up the dog and take her to the new apartment so she could have some peace, I could have the use of my arms again, and so we wouldn’t run the risk of her peeing on something and costing us another 1000LE.
The police did basically nothing for about four hours. They pinched the bridges of their noses, they rubbed their temples, they asked the lawyer to ask his client and her sister to stop screaming, they told Maged they wanted to hear our story directly from Marisol and I but they didn’t speak English well and we couldn’t get out more than a sentence or two before the lawyer would shout over us (and into our abused eardrums). Eventually we stopped trying and let the Egyptians yell at each other. The landlady kept demanding 1000LE to replace the air conditioner remotes, we kept repeating in hoarse whispers that she wasn’t asking for only 1000LE, but rather 1000LE MORE since she’d already kept 800LE from our deposit that she had no right to, and Maged kept speaking to the senior officer and the lawyer in a reasonable, if tense, tone, to try to work out a deal. The officer at one point offered 200LE from his own pocket to resolve the issue but the landlady said she wanted US to pay and that it wasn’t enough.
The most frustrating thing to me is that there wasn’t actually anything stopping us from leaving except that the movers wouldn’t take the stuff downstairs. They were legally allowed to. It was our stuff and we were outside the apartment. Our belongings weren’t in dispute. But the landlady would scream at the movers whenever they tried to move a box and the police declined to clarify to these poor confused guys that they had every right to take the stuff downstairs. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe us, but they were scared, and eventually went downstairs to smoke and hang out where there were fewer hysterical women.
If we could have filed a police report, we could have legally stayed in the apartment until the case went to court (usually around three months) without paying a cent in rent and we likely would have won because the landlady’s behavior was so out of proportion and because she’d already kept so much of our money. But to file a police report, we would have had to go to the police station. And to go to the police station, we would have had to leave our stuff in the hallway. The landlady had already made a move to grab one of our rolling suitcases and force it past Marisol back into the apartment just before the police arrived (because of the rule that if we had anything in the apartment we could be considered trespassing). This wasn’t just to boost her argument for when the police arrived. She still thought we didn’t have a key to the apartment anymore so by moving our bags inside, she thought she could locking them in and us out if worse came to worse. Marisol had to literally tear bag out of her hands. So we couldn’t leave our stuff to make a police report and the police would neither let us take them downstairs nor station an officer to watch them.
So our boxes stayed in the hallway and the fight ranged from around them to into the apartment and back again attracting the horrified and puzzled stares of our neighbors who kept telling us “malesh” which means, “I am sorry for you.” Because this was all very unusual and irrational behavior for Egyptians who generally appreciate the value of interpersonal relationship and will even sacrifice a good deal or something valuable to avoid grudges and part on good terms. This was why her son had offered the money from his own pocket to smooth things over with us. He and his sister showed up around 11:30 and had the same shocked and appalled faces as the neighbors and never said a word, just stood there like they were watching hyenas eat a baby.
Around 12:30am, I made a proposition to the police and to the lawyer. “I will give him 300LE,” I said, “not them,” gesturing to the screaming ladies, “him.” “Then tomorrow or the next day we will buy two air conditioning remotes. We’ll bring him the receipt proving they are only 50LE each and he will give me the change.” This was basically agreeable to all parties and although the lawyer wouldn’t sign anything to that effect, the senior police officer said that we had his word (and Maged said this was the equivalent of the officer promising to enforce the agreement on his honor) that the lawyer would abide by the terms of the deal, otherwise we could call him and he would come personally to sort it out. So I forked over the cash, and we called the movers back. While we waited for them, it was just us and the cops in the hallway for a little while with the door to our apartment closed and all the screaming stopped. The senior officer made the Egyptian symbol for “these people are absolutely batshit nuts” and told us not to think all Egyptians are like that. That one moment made me feel a little better about the whole experience, like this agreement from a person in authority somehow justified how attacked and outraged Marisol and I felt about the whole thing.
We were in our new apartment within the hour. By about 1:30am. And I had work in the morning.
Of course in the cold light of day we realized we’d rather use Ron Jeremy’s belly button as a cereal bowl for the rest of our lives than ever see any of those people ever again. So we just called the 300LE a loss (which means they wound up with $10 over half our original deposit) and never went to Radio Shack or called the lawyer back.
I have had two nightmares since that night in which the landlady tells the plumbers and carpenters in the neighborhood (both of which we need to do some maintenance and build some bookshelves in our new place) that we’re unscrupulous people and not to do business with us.
Our new landlord, Mr. Wagdi called a couple days ago on our landline. We use the landline only for the internet and have never given the number out and I swear when it rang we both had this irrational thought that somehow the old landlady had found us. We hesitated to answer but when Marisol picked up it was just the new landlord calling to make sure we were happy in the apartment, that we didn’t need anything, that we didn’t want someone to come and repaint (this thing about the repainting is an unheard of level of nice for an Egyptian landlord), and that he would call a handyman if we found any problems. He even asked her “how is your family in Mexico, praise God everyone is well.”
We feel very safe and happy here. Our oven and TV are huge and we have a microwave (only the fancy offices have microwaves in Egypt) and an espresso machine. Even the dog is calmer in this apartment…though she eats a lot of paint so I’m not sure her mood is an accurate yardstick of happiness.
In other news, I almost got run over by a cute guy in an SUV yesterday outside my office. He gunned his engine, then braked sharply when he saw me in the street to let me finish crossing. Closest thing I’ve had to a date since I’ve been in Cairo.
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