Eighteen Days of Spring in Winter (2 page)

Later that evening, I sit at the dinner table with my parents and brother. My mother, despite working long hours, has never failed to provide a hot meal for us every night. How she does it, I am not quite sure. For years my father has encouraged her to get a maid. Perhaps an Ethiopian woman half her age, seeking a small fortune in the nooks and crannies of our living room. For years, my mother has refused. A maid would free up hours for her to enjoy herself like the other wives in the apartment block.

I suspect my mother chooses to sweat over the stove, wash and iron, just to avoid those other wives. Her domestic chores provide endless excuses for why she can’t join coffee mornings or Zumba class. In private, those women comment that my father is tight with his money, forgetting that my mother earns her own, or that she doesn’t come from a family who is used to that standard of living. Neither do they … but that is beside the point.

If you were looking at me now, as you were earlier, you wouldn’t recognise me. I am wearing a long Egyptian house dress of lime green, with embroidery around the jagged neckline. My hair is up in a bun, wrapped around itself like a snake digesting a meal and my contacts have been replaced with glasses.

My mother is wearing a similar dress, but in red, and her hair of thick curls, streaked with grey, falls down her back. My father is wearing a house
galabeya
… Arab men prefer dresses to trousers. His face is frowned as his moustache moves up and down to the rhythm of his jaw. My mother can tell by the up and down movement of his moustache how much he is enjoying his food. My 11 year-old brother is wearing a t-shirt way too big for him and has his baseball cap beside his plate. It would be on his head, if my father didn’t insist at every mealtime that he take it off and stop acting like he has just stepped out of an American rap video. My father stresses the word ‘rap’ rolling his rrrs and pronouncing the ‘p’ as a ‘b’, like a true Arab. Sometimes I think he does it to wind my brother up. This usually causes my brother to roll his eyes and say to father ‘rap, baba, rap … rrrrr … aaaaa … … ppppp’, dragging out each sound, as though talking to a simpleton. At this point, the moustache stops twitching and he comes back with ‘I’ll show you rap,’ or ‘How would you like me to rap …?’ These are empty threats, an inside joke between them. It usually takes a glance from my mother, at both of them, to restore order.

I enjoy these small interactions at dinner. They make me smile down at my soup. When my father orders my brother to remove the one thing that defines him, it is because he is gently reminding him to not forget where he comes from rather than attempting to supress his only son’s personality.

‘What did you buy from City Stars?’ my mother asks, bringing my attention back to the table. ‘A pink cardigan from Mango,’ I reply.

‘Always pink!’ my father butts in. ‘You could clothe the whole City of the Dead with just your pink cardigans.’

I laugh. ‘Perhaps those in the ground, but not the ones sleeping over their heads.’ The moustache turns up suddenly, indicating a smile beneath.

‘Leave her alone Ahmad,’ my mother teases. ‘Pink suits her, it means she is still my baby girl,’ turning to me with a saccharine smile. At this both my brother and I look at her with horror. As a family, we are subtle with our love.

‘If things continue as they are, we might have to start selling those cardigans for food,’ my mother suddenly warns.

‘Why?’ my father jumps.

At this point I lose interest. My parents’ conversations often start with one of them saying something dramatic and the other talking it down.

So my brother Salem and I look at each other. I slowly slide my hand over to his cap and put it on my head back to front, and strike what I can only describe as a gangster pose. My brother blushes with the embarrassment of being associated with me, even if only by our parents. I am clearly youth culture illiterate.

‘Sophia take that off,’ my father barks. ‘Not you too!’

Defeated, I take off the cap. At the age of 18, I already feel old.

‘Don’t be ridiculous Fatima,’ he says to my mother. It’s always, ‘Fatima’ and ‘Ahmad’ to each other, but ‘your mother’, ‘your father’ to us, as though we might forget we were born of their loins.

‘Something is in the air. Things are happening,’ she predicts. ‘Did you see what they did in Tunisia? You, yourself, told me about that boy in Alexandria. What was his name? Khaled Said? Killed by the security services and his battered body left on the street like a dog for his poor mother to collect. They are calling it the Arab Spring.’

‘Enough!’ my father demands, banging his fork onto his plate. ‘I will not have this talk at the dinner table. Change the subject or don’t talk at all.’ We all go quiet and return to our food.

But my mother persists. Breaking the short silence. ‘Your children will not remain children for long,’ she warns. ‘Do you not see them on their phones and computers? They are not stupid. In fact, they are probably more informed than you and I.’

And she is right, we are … well at least one of us is.

The truth is word on the street was far more meaningful than word in cyberspace. Yes, there was talk on the internet, but when people talked face to face you had to sit up and listen. In cyberspace, the dangerous consequences of what you say are shielded: face to face they are imminent. People were putting themselves in real danger before the awful autopsy pictures of Khaled Said spread to other countries for people to attach their gripes and hopes to. And the truth is the internet is full of talk, information. Deciphering it into some kind of logical meaning takes skill.

My own personal awakening came in the form of a normal taxi ride to university. In Egypt everyone is scared of the
mukhabarat
, the secret police. Except they are not secret, nor the police. Anyone can be
mukhabarat
, from the man with the fruit cart on the corner of your road to the senior executive in your office. Say anything to anyone and there is a fear they may inform on you for some financial or political gain,
or for a cup of coffee. And then your family is searching for you from one police station to another, finding nothing but heartless eyes and guilty stares.

Stories of
mukhabarat
are either true or spread by the real secret police. Either way, the word
mukhabarat
conjures up images from a horror movie … say the word five times in front of the mirror and they pop up behind you and drag you to an unknown police dungeon.

At 18, I am literate in the stories. You can’t be a university student anywhere in the world without being exposed to conspiracy theories or anti-establishment sentiments. They persist in the world of academia, no matter how hard academics try to stamp them out and where I come from the telling of conspiracy theories is a honed skill. The more elaborate the tale the more respect given to the teller. Conspiracy theories have replaced the storytelling tradition in Arab society. Once upon a time men, women and children would convene in public places all over the Arab world to hear a storyteller weave incredibly intricate tales. The story could take months to complete, with the audience loyally returning every evening to hear the next instalment: the story never quite ending, just twisting in a new and unexpected direction. Not much has changed today, except we now tell each other these stories in our air conditioned living rooms, shisha cafes and university corridors and the characters are living people.

I am not a student activist and those who are remain hidden amongst their well-adjusted peers as they whisper their tales on the way to university lectures to hear yet more narratives. My parents have raised me to be grateful for what I have and not to squander it with empty talk. But, at the same time the daily battles for backshish on the streets of Cairo make it impossible for anyone with a conscience to ignore the cold hard truth of inequity.

I am acutely aware that the privileges I enjoy are probably a by-product of someone else’s disadvantage and misfortune, but I’m not stupid enough to waste them for some youthful fantasy of social justice.

Conversations with taxi drivers are often fed by the wealth divide in Cairo. Spending sixteen hours of their day ferrying people from one part of this great city to another, listening to men and women in the back of their cars so engrossed in their own lives that all they hear is just how insane Cairo is can fill them with resentments. Catching twenty-minute naps parked under bridges or down side roads whenever they can, being harassed out of their earnings by traffic police and urinating up the city’s walls because their own homes are two days’ work away means taxi drivers have many gripes. But politics doesn’t tend to be one of them. If a Cairo taxi driver ever talks to you about politics you should know he is either
mukhabarat
or a revolution is coming.

This particular taxi driver was very articulate in his dissent. At first I smiled in nervousness. Catching his eye in the mirror, I quickly dropped the smile for fear it denoted consent. Would I even make it to the lecture hall before undercover security police escort me out of a side door and into an unmarked van for not defending our leader in the face of such lies?

The journey from my home to campus was filled with his at times lucid and at times manic anger at the system. He even mentioned the man by name. Something never done in any political talk because denial
is
a river in Egypt.

I sat silent in the back hoping he had forgotten I was even there and was instead talking to an imagined passenger or himself as they often do. At campus I jumped out, almost throwing money at him. He looked at the university sign board, looked at me and spat out the window.

Shaken, I rushed to my first lecture and by the end of it had convinced myself that he was an anomaly in an otherwise dysfunctional but organised system.

Despite the chaos, Egypt continues. You might pick up your house phone one day to discover a dead tone indicating your days as a loyal customer were over. It happened to my aunt. Her home telephone number of fifteen years just stopped working one day, despite her always paying the bill.
She contacted the telephone company to be told her contract had been terminated. Two weeks later she called the number from our house and a man in Heliopolis answered. She asked him how he got the number. ‘How do you think?’ he replied.

Or you may pay a visit to that same aunt in Zamalek to find the
bowab
has already communicated your every move to the entire block, the story following you up the communal stairs like a news reporter on a live show, embellishing each step you take. Or you may have the misfortune of witnessing a policeman beat a street child for demanding money for shining his shoes.

Whatever it is, whoever is degraded, this is the way it is in Egypt, the way it has always been. The pyramids were, after all, built by slaves and they were not offered a hot meal and comfortable bed after the final plate of gold was laid.

In the face of such ancient injustice, a taxi driver complaining about the system is at the most unnerving and at the least a man with a death wish. At least that is what I convinced myself of by the end of my first lecture.

But, as the day progressed it seemed the system was all anyone wanted to talk about. That and the man and his wife’s infinite transgressions. The list of grievances grew louder. Starting as a whisper they rose in volume, swelling like a full cast crescendo at the end of an operatic performance.

As I waved goodbye to my friends at the campus gate I had a feeling I was waving goodbye not just to them, but to a time … an existence. Somehow, all the talk had crossed a line. The girl whose reputation we had destroyed in Starbucks at the weekend had stood in front of us all and set herself alight. Suddenly the collective unspoken agreement to never speak of it had been broken. We … Cairo … Egypt … my friends … the taxi driver could not go back on what our words had committed us to. Her act of self-immolation had begun with a simple word: ‘Enough!’ and it was about to set the whole country on fire.

Let’s talk about Khaled Said. After all, we are all Khaled Said. It’s just that some of us took longer to recognise him in our own reflection, his life in our children’s future and his bruises under our own skin.

His death six months before was no different than the deaths of others. It had happened many times, even, no doubt, since his mother threw the last handful of soil over his battered body. And yet we are all Khaled Said and not any of the others. Why? Why, when death through police brutality is something that breeds resentment, but had failed to breed mass action?

There are numerous theories available on numerous platforms willing to answer that question. Sociologists, political scientists, regional experts and internet whacks all offer equally nuanced explanations. All of them contain some truth, but together they are a pack of lies.

It may have been because his death coincided with the
uprising in Tunisia. It may have been because unlike the others he was middle-class, supposedly protected from the violent force of the law. It may have been because the man who mobilised our social media personas to horror was in fact in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood, America, Israel.

Perhaps Khaled Said’s death was a domino amongst thousands, lined up waiting for the flick of a finger. Maybe his death was the impetus needed for the conscious movement of someone else’s finger. You can keep the dominos standing forever, but when one falls the rules of physics dictate that they must all eventually follow. Blink and you miss it, but the millisecond it takes contains thirty years of suppressed resentments.

We are all Khaled Said, not because of what his death came to mean: a breach of his … our rights, the full reach of Mubarak’s security police, but because of what his life was.

We are all Khaled Said because we all want what he wanted, we all feel what he felt.

A stray dog when trapped in a corner will do one of two things: it will fight or flee. Our entire lives we have been reduced to thinking like that stray dog and most of us, like Khaled up until his death, chose to flee. Dreams of a life in America, finding solace in online relationships, pop culture; to escape our futures through a fantasy life made up of a distorted reality.

Of course, Khaled Said’s death was in some ways the birth of the revolution, the first contraction of a difficult labour and urged and cajoled by others to later become the cry of a newborn. Mostly, it was a call to take the second option … to fight. But we should not forget the life that came before it. We should not forget our collective apathy.

The guilt you feel from inaction is far greater than the guilt from action. When you do something you know to be wrong, unethical or selfish, the act itself is the last to come. You have already convinced yourself, subjected your moral mind to a rationalisation process that tells you: you have no choice, you are only one person, it is just the way it is. The act, if
anything, is an affirmation of that thinking. But inaction is worse. Seeing and doing nothing fills you with a different guilt that you then have to push down into your stomach to become food for your apathy. Because you know by not acting you allowed a course to take place and at that moment when you could have intervened you could have directed that course to an infinite number of better outcomes. But, instead you sat by and did nothing. We have sat by and done nothing for so long and we consequently have carried a shame that has weighed down on our shared conscience. Passed down from one generation to another until the current generation decided to remove it, one layer at a time like hand-me-down clothes.

I told you before I am not an activist or a revolutionary. And it’s true, despite the above. Sometimes my thoughts escape me that’s all and when I think of all the times I have heard Egyptians describe how they hate Egyptians, I now realise that really they hate themselves. They hate what
we
have allowed
I
to become.

Khaled died in June 2010. Since then there have been regular protests in Alexandria and Cairo against police brutality. Even the police have demonstrated against their own brutality. And I have watched it on the news like it is happening in a distant country, far removed from the world outside my taxi window.

It is now January 2011 and the demonstrations have survived the hot summer. The cooler winter winds have not tempered the rage on the streets. If anything they have fanned the fire. Now people can go out in force not hindered by the baking sun beaming down on them, or the humid air mixed with the putrid smell of car fumes and body sweat that stings the nostrils and clouds the eyes. And I can no longer fill my days with distractions. That is not to say I stand at the front of the line of demonstrators waiting for the water cannon to wash away my guilt. Now, I have to at least sit up, acknowledge that my mother is right, something is happening and it may affect my small carved out existence.

At home that evening I was quiet, choosing to spend most of my time in my room. I had thought about Khaled, actually given his life and death my real attention instead of listening to the details like they were salacious university gossip. I thought about the taxi driver, his words, his life. I tried texting my friend but it wouldn’t go through. I went online on my phone and laptop, but the connection was so slow it was hardly worth the effort. I wondered if I was the last person in the country to know, the last to be invited to the party.

After a few frustrating hours I joined my family in the living room. My mother was watching a soap opera. My brother was nowhere to be seen, probably in his room listening to music on his headphones. My father was reading a newspaper.

I sat at my mother’s feet and she absent-mindedly began to stroke my hair. A wave of comfort ran through me from my head down. I felt her slow hand breathe hope into my dejected spirit.

I soon became consumed by the soap opera. The plot was outrageous. It was so fantastical you had to wonder who could come up with such unbelievable storylines. Of course soap operas are meant to be fantasy, but the ones favoured by Egyptians are in a league of their own. I could not help but laugh as the woman on the screen, with more make-up on her face than at a Bobby Brown convention, broke the news to her adoring husband that the baby in her stomach was in fact his dead father’s. Looking up at my mother I hoped to find the same contempt in her eyes, but instead she continued to stare intently at the television screen. I realised then the soap opera was her escape.

I got up and sat next to my father on the sofa. I peered at the newspaper, reading it over his shoulder. He stopped to look at me. ‘You are restless, Sophia, what is bothering you?’ he asked. I thought of telling him, telling him about the taxi driver, university, Khaled, everything, but I didn’t know where to start. My mind was conflicted. So much told me to be fearful, but life seemed so normal. My father’s eyes
showed no fear, no concern except for his own daughter. What filled my head seemed to exist only there, and yet I knew it didn’t. My mother had mentioned it the night before and out there it was all anyone was talking about. In truth, I had been conscious of it for a long time, but not aware. I smiled at my father and shook my head. ‘Nothing baba,’ I assured him.