The Groove of Routine

A Travelogue in Five Parts By Nicholas Kulish

Nicholas Kulish spent more than half a decade tracing the path of Aribert Heim, a Nazi concentration camp doctor who fled postwar justice in Germany. The research for his book on Heim, The Eternal Nazi, co-authored with Souad Mekhennet, led him to Denmark, Austria, Egypt, Morocco, and across Germany. This week on the Logger we’ll be posting five entries from his travels. Catch up with Part I. 

II. Cairo, Egypt

If you wanted to eat well in Cairo, really well, you had to go to Chelsea’s. Nagi was adamant about this. I was intrigued. Was it called that because it was New York style, I quizzed him, like the neighborhood Chelsea? He didn’t know. Did an American or an Englishwoman named Chelsea start it? Possibly, but he was unsure. Had they dubbed it in honor of Bill Clinton’s daughter? Again, he couldn’t say. These weren’t the sorts of questions that occupied Nagi. He was all about the food. Chelsea’s wasn’t in the guidebook, nor could I Google it. Most likely it had an unusual spelling we didn’t know or was such a small neighborhood place that you could only find it if you passed it.

To say that Nagi was the driver in Egypt for my coauthor Souad Mekhennet and me would accurately describe the invoice but somehow miss the point entirely. Guide, advisor, local historian, hilarious friend and cranky uncle: all would be closer to the mark. When we were stuck in traffic—and more often than not we were stuck in traffic—he would use the license plate of the car in front of us to quiz me on my Arabic numbers. I would practice expressions from the Berlitz course on my iPod, “Is this the way to the airport?” and he would chortle merrily at my hopeless pronunciation. He smoothed over small misunderstandings, chatted up employees at hospitals and graveyards. He was indispensible.

Nagi also loved to eat, as often as six times a day. Within an hour or two of breakfast I would find myself sharing several ta’amiya sandwiches from a street vendor or a corner shop tucked into a downtown alley. When we went out for dinner in Nasr City with Mahmoud Doma, one of Heim’s closest confidantes in Egypt, Nagi polished off my leftover stuffed pigeon, then asked to have Souad’s wrapped up for takeaway. In the afternoon we would tell him we needed a quick stop for something to eat and find ourselves impatiently wading through a five-course lunch, the day slipping away from us as Nagi sipped lentil soup and nibbled delicately on pickled vegetables.

To save money we stayed at the...