Mahmoud of Giza

Mahmoud spends his days with animals, pretending to hand over the reins of power to a carriage full of tourists, steering the horse through hot sand to the feet of the pyramids. Later he tugs the string threaded through the camels' noses, leading just one pair of overweight and stingy foreigners past the tendrils of acrid smoke from evening garbage fires and into the Sahara.

"Don't make me angry," he said when I handed him a 200-dollar-bill as baksheesh, the second I handed him that today. The sudden atmosphere shift from garrulous to murderous might have shocked me had I not met so many men like him before -- poor and hardworking, dreaming and overburdened, full of hope and bitter resentment. I neither feared nor entirely trusted his response to my token of thanks. Maybe it was insufficient, maybe no amount would satisfy.

Where does Mahmoud live? No longer, he said, with his wife and her constant demands for money for the flat and their 5-month-old son. Who is Mahmoud's boss? We speculated it might be Mohamed, who appeared so confident with his government ID that he said licensed him as a guide to Giza, licensed him, it seemed, to do very little aside from convince us to step into a horse-drawn carriage and take our money. Would Mohamed give Mahmoud a cut of the $160 we paid him? Mohamed said he had a boss, signalling to a large-faced man who immediately accepted the terms of our agreement that Mohamed had treated, just minutes before, as highway robbery. And where did the first men, Ibah, who took us to meet Mohamed, fit into this scheme? Was the introduction alone worthy of a cut? 

All of these men are no doubt suffering like so many because of a pandemic that has no end and that has hit tourism so hard. I go to bed not knowing what role I'm playing in this discomfiting transaction.