The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  Before midnight, we took can-canning pictures in the station as the night train south hissed up to the platform.

  CAIRO, AFTER MIDNIGHT. We left our hotel to take in the misty night air on the east bank of the Nile. I ate the breeze like energy and lived the moments as if we were walking through a painting. I believed in the grandeur of The City of a Thousand Minarets, and so I saw it.

  In the empty roundabout that circles Tahrir Square, a few men held cans of paint and flags in an orange pocket of light under a streetlamp. It was December 30, cold, and the wheeled furnace where yams baked during the day was no longer puffing sweet, sticky smoke. The men moved quickly to meet us in the middle of the road. Paintbrushes immediately followed handshakes, and we surrendered to the welcoming face masks they made. In the reflection of the yam cart, I saw that they had drawn neat Egyptian flags—stripes of red, white and black—from cheeks to chin, and something like the number 2 and a heart on my forehead. We took pictures together against a falafel cart. Whatever we represented to them, to me they were totems of the revolution. I felt the imminence of something important: this was Tahrir Square—Midan Tahrir!—and the fact that I was covered in paint with my back to a pile of radishes belied nothing at all.

  Despite its grand name, there was once nothing special about Tahrir Square by the KFC and the only metro in Africa. Before the revolution, it wouldn’t have been a place to gather, ever really, let alone to ring in the new year. But this plot had earned its place in international history the same way the protestors had, scarred and beaten and resilient.

  One day earlier while we were pleasantly touring, Egyptian police had raided and shut down ten NGOs, including four American organizations. If it was a sign of anything more than an autocratic tantrum, it hinted that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces didn’t care so much about Americans anymore—even with $1.5 billion in annual aid money earmarked from the United States to Egypt, and all but $200 million of that for the military. The SCAF, also called the Military Council, had seized power in the vacuum left by Mubarak and broken its promises to return the government to the people. And those twenty officers were mad for theater.

  Illegal graffiti repeated on the walls around the square drew the lines of argument most succinctly. “Fuck SCAF,” it said.

  As the paint dried on my nose, a man in a trench coat led us into the heart of the square, a small circular embankment now covered in muddy grass no more than three hundred feet across. The circle is sometimes called as-Saniyya, “the Tray.”

  A tartan scarf burst from the neckline of his taupe coat underneath perfectly parted hair and a dark goatee, and he invited us to sit with our backs against a canvas tent. Three revolutionaries wafted over. There was a protective atmosphere about the whole thing, and they quietly assumed the role of guardians while we listened. I scanned the empty roundabout and wondered if there really were any threats, or if they were acting for the theater of it.

  For all the tension I expected, wanted, searched for—it was quiet. A gun might have been drawn. The army might have come through to raise trouble, or to level the place with guns and camels as they had a year earlier. It wasn’t; they didn’t. There was only talk, and a kind of talk that might have sounded self-righteous if I didn’t want to believe in their ideals. I wanted only to engage, no matter what they were saying, and so we did, listening for hours.

  “Do you want a democracy like in America?” Masha asked into a black cowl that hung over a thin, chiseled face, almost skeletal.

  “I need justice,” he said, in a voice high and light, almost evaporating before it reached us.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means lots. That’s why we are standing and still fighting.”

  “Eighty percent of the people are worthless for a revolution,” said Tarek, the trench-coated from above his Burberry scarf. “Like I always give the example, if Benjamin Netanyahu came to rule Egypt, 80 percent of the people would say, ‘Come on, we know the guy!’ ”

  That was what we were: desperate for change and desperate for the familiar. We fought to raze everything to the ground and to hold on to everything we ever wanted. And when push came to gunpoint, would it always be the familiar that won?

  “It’s a matter of time, right?” Tarek said soon. Eventually, another people would begin to make the right kind of progress. I wanted to hear how to take steps forward, too, how to have renewed hope, how to find direction when my past protests had brought me closer to nothing.

  And then I thought: What on blue earth am I doing? How absolutely fucked do I have to be to project my Bildung onto the narrative of the world’s roman? How self-centered did I have to be to see a four thousand-year-old country as a metaphor for myself?

  Just then, we heard shouting coming from the tents near KFC. Everyone stood. Someone had thrown a glass at someone else. Our hosts were quick to offer protection, insisting we remain calm.

  “Think we’re suicidal? We have these fights every hour.”

  A little charge ran up my ribs. It was late now. Tarek warned us of treacherous taxis that whisked people from the square straight to the police—a doctor had disappeared that way—and offered to walk us home.

  “Are they walking so far?” the bone-thin man said with real warmth.

  Our double-upgraded room at the Shepheard’s Hotel was close. Tarek’s was a little closer—he was staying at the $240-per-night Inter-Continental. We made fun of him for saying that he liked having a view of the square, where he could “look down and make sure everything is okay.” Maybe he was a better organizer because he slept on three hundred-count long-staple Egyptian cotton sheets.

  “You know, some hotels don’t know how to even market this revolution. I’d make revolution tours, like you guys man. You get a little can of tear gas, you get a mask and you see all the action.”

  I felt my face paint crinkle. The red, white and black and the rough heart on my forehead were tightening like a second layer of skin. Was that actually us—vulture touring for want of a cheap thrill?

  “It’s Disneyland!” Tarek beamed.

  THE NEXT EVENING, bands played on a huge stage that had appeared in the last day and cheer songs broke out in intermittent eruptions. The first New Year’s of the new era, the night was a celebratory warm-up to the first anniversary of the revolution, January 25. The lampposts and flooded patches of dirt remembered the last year’s violence, and, in still existing, modeled a kind of stoicism for the future.

  I don’t remember how we met Nevine—the Professor, the Organizer, the Mom. She was just there, keeping an eye out among the chanting thousands, and she pulled us away from Tarek into one of the many tents that had stood for the past month and a half of second-wave protests, and stored the minimal provisions necessary for life in the square. She sat us in the small circle of friends on the floor.

  “How many times did you drink tea in plastic cups for New Year’s?”

  The black tea scalded through the hair-thin cups that, in other hands, doubled as windshields for candles stuck through the bottom. Every so often when the wind blew, the cup would catch and go up in a burst of flame.

  “Homeless!” She beamed. “We are the thugs, we are the homeless people of Egypt.”

  It was a ten-dollar word in Cairo, in English or in Arabic: thugs or baltagiya. The baltagiya came typically in packs, rogue but in the service of power. The word is Turkish for “axeman.”

  Antiregime looters had vandalized Cairo in the early days of the revolution, even raiding prisons and freeing the inmates, but the baltagiya were almost always instruments of the powerful, the ones with extra pounds on hand. They were favorites of Mubarak, and now, of the military. It was grisly how gracefully the machinery changed hands.

  The Emergency Law, né Law Number 162 of 1958, allowed the government to arrest suspects “dangerous to the security and public order” without a warrant. The Emergency Law stood for the entirety of Mubarak’s reign, and when the square cleared to celebrate his o
uster, the protestors who stayed stayed because Mubarak was just the master of those measures. The revolution couldn’t end until they were erased along with him. Without that, the transition was almost meaningless.

  One year later, on the eve of the great day of expectation, January 25, 2012, SCAF chairman Mohamed Hussein Tantawi announced that the law would be lifted. Citizens’ rights would be returned. But he left one important clause untouched: warrantless arrests were still kosher, in those cases of what Tantawi called “thuggery.” Anyone, said everyone, could be accused of thuggery.

  There was a new addition to the tent, purchased just that day from a market across town. It was heavy, with a tight black leather skin, and metal studs down the length. When Nevine leaned on it, her hands rested just above her navel.

  “Do you feel safer now that you have the clubs, too?”

  “Not me, because I use my tongue and my brains,” she said. “And my tongue secured the Square the past week. I got them to really leave the Square. The first day we were less than a hundred fifty and at least fifty thousand came—the paid people, the hired people.” In the Square, numbers were conspicuously round. “Today, less than fifty because of me.”

  Nevine said the uprising had its own security force fifty-strong. “From poor areas, tough, who are really used to fighting. And then they have a club and they say, ‘Go. Out!’ ”

  “Are they paid?”

  “NO! They are from us.”

  One of these men no older than me and Masha was in the tent now. He wore a neon yellow security vest and a hard hat. The two revolutionaries posed for a picture. The rebel cop made a V with his fingers and looked at me straight, eyes relaxed. Nevine, a black and white checkered keffiyeh tied around her head, wore a devilish little grin.

  “We’re criminals!” she said.

  I felt the weight of the club in a cold hand. I imagined swinging it at someone’s head, someone swinging it at mine.

  “It’s quite heavy, yeah. But you can kill somebody using this one,” Nevine laughed. “We arrest a lot of officers here.”

  “What happens to them?”

  “You want to know? We hit them until they die.”

  “How often does that happen?”

  “At least once a week. And more people are scared of visiting us since they know they are killed or thrown out.” A pause. “But really, really, people die. They hit them, throw them on the street, call the ambulance—by the time they go to the hospital they are dead.”

  “We are fighters, you know, people who are born in deserts. Different from people who are born in gardens, right? The weather is enough: very cold nights, very warm days—the weather is enough. Also, the food that the land produces is different, and you have to depend on meat. And this makes you aggressive, it’s a fact. We are aggressive, it’s a fact. So we are not like people who can be led easily. Do this, do that. Once we open our eyes, khalas, finished.”

  Artists of the revolution and national headliners took the stage. Music drifted in through the tent flaps and we poked out. A light breeze set Masha’s cup instantly on fire, singeing her hair. The men mobilized, some with bandaged hands and canes, broken noses, eye patches and looks of intense concern.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Do you need a bandage?”

  They made her sit. The man with the cane stood to offer his place.

  “No, really . . .” Masha said.

  “Sit.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “We don’t want you to get hurt.”

  She let them seat her, these men with their scars and damaged limbs. There was only the faint smell of burned hair. “It looks fine,” they said. “You can’t even tell.”

  It was summer camp here, sitting around a campfire or a flaming teacup and telling stories. And it was a place to kill people.

  Blithely, I felt no dissonance. Despite my Quaker schooling, I couldn’t bring myself to denounce Nevine’s team’s clubbings, neither out loud nor to Masha nor in secret. Nevine ordered her men to strike back or they did it on their own. If it were me, surrounded by belligerents and with traitors appearing from the tents next door, I’d have bought a club, too. During the Libyan revolution, I relished the news graphics that showed the Honorable Rebels gaining ground against the Evil Dictator. Simple. Good. In Egypt, no such hope. The battle lines dissolved in Tahrir Square (as they would soon in Libya, too). The Tray overflowed with fake protestors, scattered ideology, thugs, government moles—confusion.

  They wanted so badly for us to have a good time—to see the revolution on its happiest day in a long while. And . . . that’s all it was. This grand milestone before a grand anniversary at the heart of the uprising, and it was just another night. I chatted casually of murder and brotherhood and joined the Down With chants just to yell at someone specific.

  All the while, I kept seeing me in the crowds of disaffected youth looking for answers. What I heard when I listened to the small secrets of the square—immediate danger could masquerade as clarity. And then when the threat was gone, the moment’s solid footing would slip again.

  “If we arrest somebody from the intelligence that is staying in a tent, it’s a big thing. So even if I tell him do not hit him, they will hit him and they all go after him bap bap bap bap bap bap bap! and use everything, knives and clubs. So he have to die. And sometimes also, more often we arrest thugs. And just between us, two of us, we also have a jail. We have a jail and the thugs we arrested are put in jail and they attack each other inside. Thank you for coming,” she said. “A good educational trip, right?”

  I did not seek out the supposed counterjails, and I did not scan the hospital for the bludgeoned bodies of police officers. I found no reports of protestors killing the baltagiya—but then again, who would such reports have come from? The SCAF wouldn’t have wanted their lackeys to hear this. And unlike Bashar al-Assad in the initial months of the Syrian protests, they had no imaginary “terrorists” to blame for violence. This was no hidden corner of southwestern Syria; journalists and Twitter had brought the spotlight to this amphitheater, and the world could see far more clearly who the regime was fighting.

  Masha and I squeezed each other in the shelter of the crowd, and the year changed number.

  Since she had arrived at our pyramid-side palace, we had coiled around each other—too close, perhaps, to really see each other. In a connection that skintight, she could only feel my panic reverberating—in my overreactions to her flight delays, in my anxiety about train tickets, in our late nights bouncing compulsively from falafel stand to a one-room Cairene casino looking for more, more. To her, the place was the cause of my jitters; to me, it just wasn’t the cure.

  AROUND TAHRIR SQUARE, there are falafel carts selling six thin, dry pitas full for a dollar. In Egyptian Arabic, falafel is ta‘amiyya, “little food.” Across from the square, behind the street arrays of T-shirts supporting various uprisings and Syrian flags and the new Libyan tricolor, there is a KFC. It was a KFC that was once shut down with “No Mubarak” spray painted over its glass doors, the revolution’s injured and unwell deposited at a makeshift clinic under the awning. In a few weeks, the Mubarak regime would start a rumor that protestors were camping in Tahrir only because organizers were distributing Kentucky. A YouTube upload quickly mocked this idea with a joking endorsement—holding a date biscuit over his head, a young man makes his revolutionary demands: “One Kentucky for every citizen! One Kentucky for every citizen!”

  For the average Egyptian, the fast-food chain with its American prices is no budget fare. Cairo had made us forcefully aware of our place in the world—as tourists, as Americans, as wealthy children for whom the price of brand-name chicken was a drop in the bucket. With a guilty stomach, I still bought two KFC combo meals and heaps of coleslaw for the overnight train to Aswan, to which we were fleeing under the banner of exploratory curiosity. With the sea air in our big noses—Masha
and I shared those and were mistaken as brother and sister for it—we’d keep moving, from Egypt’s northern tip toward its southernmost point.

  On the way to the station, we rode with Hisham. He was loud and funny and erudite in the taxi driver’s book of quips.

  “Welcome to Alaska!” he shouted, like so many Cairene cabbies did. “Welcome to Hawaii!”

  “What-ever!” Hisham would say often and for no reason, with perfect Valley Girl syncopation. This was his shout-out to America. He gave us his number, to call for taxi service when we returned to Cairo. “See you later alligator!” he called.

  Fellow passengers stared at the mountains of chicken we lugged into our sleeper compartment—I didn’t know the sixty-five-dollar fare included dinner, but when I smelled it I was glad I never had. I slid the door closed quickly.

  THE CITYSCAPE DISAPPEARED against black windows to leave us with that funny sense of being without context or responsibility. American movies on an American laptop, and in the satisfying postchicken lull—carefree sex on the cot that folded out from the wall as we mounted farther into Upper Egypt.

  “Upper” Egypt is the length of the Nile valley south of ancient Egypt’s capital at Memphis, fifteen miles south of downtown Cairo, to the frontier of ancient Egypt. All this was Sa‘id Masr, the “Egyptian Plateau.”

  When we woozily stepped off the train in Aswan, everything looked different. The main street followed the wide bluffs along the Nile, the sidewalks were less crowded than up north, keffiyeh styles had changed—what had protected against cold shoulders now protected against hot heads.