Cairo’s bridge of dreams

Cairo

The lovers and the fishermen, the street kids and the cops, the veiled girls and the flower sellers, they all come at dusk to the bridge over the Nile, stealing kisses and tugging their lines, escaping the heat and hoping for magic, the boys whispering promises bigger than their pockets as moonlit boats glide beneath them.

Hotel lights glow along the corniche in the distance and somehow Cairo’s grit and poverty are gone; night makes everything pure. That’s when dreams and memories unfold on the bridge.

Ibrahim Adel, a waiter, tells his fiancee, yes, he will one day own a restaurant. Yehia Helmi, a barber, lifts his grandson to the railing and points to a sail flickering in the darkness. Samir Shawki skitters with his buddies through the traffic. And Ali Mohammed Hussein, a sturdy man with a bent nose, sells wilted roses in cellophane.

The Qasr el Nil Bridge carries tens of thousands of cars a day, but at night its wide sidewalks are shoulder to shoulder with Egyptians. There is no sweeter spot for a cheap date, a refuge from big families and crowded apartments. A brush of the hand, a smile, all the subtle rituals of Muslim romance play out in tiny dramas amid the call to prayer and the river breeze.

“We have to know one another for a while and then we have to inform our families before we are engaged,” says Nora el Badry, wearing subtle eyeliner and a pink head scarf and standing with her fiance, Ahmed Maguid, a tall, thin engineering student. “The way we get to know one another is different from abroad. There are limits to what young couples can do before marriage.”

Police officers in white uniforms patrol the quarter-mile-long bridge, but there is little trouble. A businessman on his way home from work puts down his briefcase, lights a cigar and watches young women walking in twos and threes, some wearing sequined hijabs, others with hair flowing freely. A man in a tailored suit strolls past, his shoulders back, his shoes newly polished, a lady in a print dress at his side. Traffic thickens and the bridge deck shimmies underfoot, like wind rippling through a carpet.

Eman Samir studies commerce at the university. She believes in her boyfriend, Ibrahim Adel, who has wavy black hair and the two top buttons open on his shirt. He majors in sociology and waits tables at a riverboat restaurant. They come to the bridge five to six times a week, staring at the luxury hotels on the shore, where the price of a room is more than what many Egyptians would pay for four months’ rent.

“My dream is to own an Italian restaurant,” Adel says. “It won’t be easy. It won’t take less than 15 years.”

“I support him in what he does,” Samir says.

Their conversation meanders like the Nile. “We agree on many things,” Adel says. “We share aspirations.”

“He doesn’t want me to work.”

“It will be enough for her to stay at home with the children.”

Samir caresses Adel’s arm; they turn and look across the water. A horse carriage clops past, motor scooters and cars squeal and beep, and the river’s tang rises amid the scent of cologne and the click of text messages sent from cellphones. The pink in the sky fades to gray, slips to black; the kites that snapped on the horizon vanish, and the bridge, flat and wide and trimmed in iron railings worn smooth by generations of leaning elbows and tilted fishing poles, is alight with lampposts.

A family passes. A soda is shared. Radios scratch with news and music, and Yehia Helmi, a barber for 40 years, arrives from the faraway neighborhood of Heliopolis.

“I usually stay on the bridge from 6 p.m. until midnight,” he says, holding his grandson, Hamada. “The river has remained the same, but now you have boats on both sides and all these nice hotels. It wasn’t like this when I was younger. You come today for the view. I need to escape the crowds. We are all trying to breathe in this overpopulated city.”

The boy wriggles in his arms, gets down and looks toward the river spinning and whirling silently below.

“I used to come here years ago with my fiancee,” says Helmi, who brought a folding chair and a snack. “She’s my wife now. She’s sick today, though. I’m here to live those memories again.”

A dour little man selling candy bars from a box is waved off by Sarah Gamal and Sarah Mustafa, best friends who graduated two days earlier from high school. Gamal plans to study French literature; Mustafa wants to be a doctor. They look to the shore. Beyond the silhouettes of palm trees, a banner of President Hosni Mubarak hangs from a building. He is Oz-like in the night, his painted face lighted and billowing in the wind. The girls weren’t born when the former Air Force officer took control of the country, but they have lived with his legacy.

“The future is murky,” says Gamal, relaxed yet perturbed in a single breath. “God willing, we’ll go to university, but will we find work when we finish? A lot of my friends don’t have jobs. The government does nothing. It tries to distract the youth, but won’t help them.”

“We are like all young Egyptians,” says Mustafa, her round face bordered by a mauve-colored scarf.

“The young won’t bring about change,” Gamal says. “They’re too depressed.”

Mustafa looks to the lights and the knot of cars and humanity whooshing past her. “The bridge is our summer resort,” she says with a laugh.

Quick and lithe as shadows, Samir Shawki and his buddies, one brown-skinned and tall, the other smiling through rotted teeth, dart through traffic from side to side across the bridge. They laugh and joke, eavesdropping on conversations and happy that Shawki, who is 13 and wants to be a cop, has not brought his girlfriend.

“I come to look at these buildings,” says Shawki, holding a crumpled bank note in his hand that’s worth about a dime. “We don’t have such nice buildings where I live. Maybe we have one or two good buildings. My girlfriend came here with me once. We walked around and chatted. But I feel more relaxed with these guys. I have to worry about protecting my girlfriend when I’m out with her.”

Shawki jumps up on the railing. Four freshly showered older guys are talking nearby about the weather, geophysics and jobs in the oil industry. They’re on their way to a movie, but they’ll be back on the bridge later. Shawki watches them go, then gathers his friends, Hassan and Nader, who fit so perfectly under Shawki’s draped arm that it seems they have been cut from paper.

“We’ll stay here a few more hours,” Shawki says, “then we’ll go watch TV on my aunt’s roof.”

The bridge, with its bronze lions at each entrance, was built by a French company in 1872 to link the rich neighborhood of Zamalek to Old Cairo. Back then, it was named the Khedive Ismail Bridge after an Egyptian ruler fascinated by architecture. The 1952 coup that brought the military to power stripped many buildings and bridges of their royal titles, and the Khedive Ismail Bridge became the Qasr el Nil -- Palace of the Nile.

Myth and fact, secrets and confessions are traded nightly on this span. Little lives with scuffing feet and worn-down heels keep coming, just like Ali Mohammed Hussein, the sweaty flower seller with his armful of roses. If he’s lucky, and the lovers are happy, or they are making up after a quarrel, he can earn $5 a night.

“I can tell who will buy and who will not,” he says. “It’s the way they look at me. A newly engaged couple will buy flowers, but not so much for married couples.”

As Hussein speaks, two undercover police officers sidle up behind him. They listen and whisper to him that he shouldn’t say the wrong thing or talk too much. He seems confused about what the wrong thing could be. The cops disappear into the crowd. Hussein’s eyes follow them for a moment and then he leans against the railing, the dark Nile below him flowing northward, past the neon and the pyramids, toward the sea.

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jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com