CAIRO — The men eat mashed beans with onions and garlic, mixing in hot sauce and drinking water from the same tin cup, all of them watching Nabil Helmy stir his ladle in a deep pot.
Helmy's not much of a talker, but the guys spooning up his beans, known as faoul, have plenty to say, sometimes even mentioning the cost of Helmy's breakfast, which has nearly doubled to 41 cents. What can he do? Inflation. The men spit that word out like a bad pepper.
Said Nazir says these days he can afford only donkey meat sausages for dinner, which his cat won't even touch. Hani Salem, a plainclothes cop, wants to know how you can raise a child -- his wife is pregnant with their first -- on $67 a month. That doesn't sound bad to Ahmed Ali Mahmoud, who left the sugar cane fields to seek his fortune in Cairo only to find a job parking cars and sleeping on the floor of a garage owned by Sedgi Hafez, who, with a propane flame and a battered kettle, sells tea on the corner and tends to his wife and seven children.
This is Egypt, guys eating breakfast, worried that the ever-slimming fold of bills in their pockets won't get them through lunch. The faoul stand is where they come for sustenance, where they come to gripe. It's the corner bar on a donkey cart, no booze but plenty of hot beans and shredded vegetables. Hundreds of faoul stands steam and rattle on the streets and alleys of Cairo; they endure, like the mosques and the curved banks of the Nile. Cops eat for free; everyone else pays.
Helmy's setup is in the shade on a street packed with offices, apartments and delivery boys who dart like skipping stones through traffic. There's a newsstand across the way, the guy who runs it has quick hands and suspicious eyes. The buzz of flies plays alongside radio music and sometimes a chanted verse from the Koran softens the air until it's chased away by a truck horn or a dog barking, or Helmy's ladle scraping the pot.
Nazir slips out of his government office every morning and orders the usual. He likes what Helmy does with beans, cooked just right, but he's disappointed in the bread, so he adds onion and cabbage at no extra charge. He eats like a man driving a getaway car. He wipes the grease from his hands and lights a Cleopatra cigarette, beads of sweat shining in his tight curly hair, morning heat creeping through the shade of the trees.
