Chapter 4. Caught. In this chapter of Like Two Rivers, Katarina arrives for the first time in Cairo to take care of a unexpected inheritance from the mother she never knew.
4. Caught. 2003. August
Cairo, 2003, August. To step into Cairo was an abrupt and potent confrontation with the acuteness of her own ignorance. It was like walking down familiar steps in the dark and to your astonishment, finding that there was one more step than anticipated. The sudden short drop and the snap, when you slam into reality, shoots like a cold instinctual fear up through your bones. Nobody warned her that the world was far less simple than what she had been told. To her Cairo was as complex, unpredictable, familiar, and as real as where she had just come from, but in a way she could not easily decipher.
The frustration that the unfamiliar was nothing but a well-known story written with a different alphabet, halftones, and an incomprehensible grammar made her feel stupid. Nothing was as she had expected. They did not drive slowly through narrow streets and bustling market squares between low whitewashed houses. No Bedouins sporting large turbans or women in colourful garbs and silver jewellery offered her exotic goods through the windows. A trail of jubilant, barefoot kids did not follow the car. No camel or snake charmers—and the city was not a haphazard or cheap version of the west. It did not consist of dusty streets, tanks, and fleeing crowds. No public executions and no menacing long-bearded men with ogling eyes. No beggars—almost. Instead, she sailed through the traffic on wide roads through the new suburbs. No one in the other cars seems to notice her. The city was its own and did not need her. The unforeseen distance between the expectations, that she was not aware that she had, and the queer ordinariness of the unfamiliar, made her head spin.