I visited my friend Mostafa the tailor in his downtown shop a few weeks after Egypt’s uprising. Mostafa is in his early seventies but has always seemed old, perhaps because he’s bald and bent from his work. He lives alone, enjoys conversation and despises the Egyptian government, whom he refers to as ‘those dogs’. Nor had his opinion changed in light of recent events. ‘Still dogs,’ he said. Whenever I asked how business was, his reply was always the same: ‘The market is asleep.’ This time he said ‘It’s out cold’, with a broad and utterly toothless grin. His teeth had been removed, he told me, by a dentist who advised eating stale bread to toughen his gums in preparation for dentures.
One of Mostafa’s favourite topics is currency exchange rates, which he can recite on any given day to the farthest decimal point, offering comparisons between current and past values, what you once could buy with a drachma, riyal, lira or Egyptian pound versus now. He has mercifully learned to recognize my glazed look when these recitals last too long, but I liked to hear him talk about himself, which he did with verve, downloading the significant episodes of his life, most of which occurred in his youth.
