TAXI
KHALED ALKHAMISSI
Translated by Jonathan Wright
I dedicate this book to the life that dwells in the words of simple people. May it swallow up the void that has haunted us for many years.
Contents
Made in Egypt
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Fifty-one
Fifty-two
Fifty-three
Fifty-four
Fifty-five
Fifty-six
Fifty-seven
Fifty-eight
A Note on the Translator
Footnotes
Made in Egypt
‘You know when you have a scruffy old shirt that’s in an awful state and stinks, and it’s been too small for you for ages? And you’ve got into fights in it as well and it’s spattered with blood, and you’d bought it secondhand in the first place and the guy who had it before you was a criminal on the run who’s hiding out in Sharm el-Sheikh? You have three options with that shirt: first, you can burn it to get rid of it for good, and go and buy a new one; second, you can have it altered to fit you and buy some new cloth for it, and try to remove the blood stains and the stench; or third, you can give it a good wash and have it ironed with one of those old-fashioned foot-irons and tell yourself: “That’s the easiest way and there’s a chance I might lose weight again.” That’s what’s happening now with the political system after Mubarak scrammed and went off to Sharm el-Sheikh. We want to set fire to the whole of the old system because frankly the stench is unbearable now. The army seems to want to give the old shirt a good wash and iron and have us wear it again, and if that doesn’t work, they’re thinking of patching it up, bringing in a few new people to act as sleeves, and even if the old shirt doesn’t have buttonholes, we’ll just have to go with it.’
He was a man in his late fifties, so large that the buttons on his own shirt would hardly stay in their holes. They had to reach around as far as they could to hold on to the other half of the shirt. His paunch was pressed so tight against the steering wheel that it almost prevented him from turning it. With every move the taxi made, with every bump in the road, his vast belly shook and I could hear the buttons straining to pop. I looked at his shirt and saw it was filthy. ‘If the system’s anything like your shirt, it’ll need plenty of material to smarten it up,’ I told him. He laughed and the whole car shook. ‘I bought this shirt before Mubarak came to power,’ he replied. ‘That means it’s about 30,000 years old. I should have had it burned long ago, just as we should now set fire to the whole of the old system. The time’s come to make a clean start. Today my son told me the demonstrations will continue right across Egypt to tell the army “You helped us and we’re grateful, but now you have to understand we don’t accept the wash and iron process you’re trying to sell us.”’
‘And which shirt do you like?’ I asked him, ‘the white one, the green one, the red one or the flashy one?’ ‘We’ve seen every colour and we can see what happens abroad,’ he answered. ‘Democracy, what a joke! Democracy in America brought Bush and in Italy it brought Berlusconi, and there are plenty of others like them. We’ve seen billionaires manipulating policies and people, and we’ve seen the worst of times with thieving presidents. No one’s happy with the state of politics. Here in Egypt most people won’t accept a state based on religion and at the same time they won’t accept a state that’s hostile to it. We want a shirt that’s tailor-made for Egypt, our own shirt, I mean a shirt that smells of jasmine, made of Egyptian cotton. It would be the colour of the Nile, a shirt that makes us feel free when we wear it so we know we’re working the way we should be for our country. These days everyone wants to work. They want to be productive. They want a government that knows how to make the most of that feeling every Egyptian feels deep down. Look around you. Look at people’s dreams floating in the air, waiting for someone to grab them. If someone blew a trumpet today, you’d find all 90 million Egyptians standing in a queue. You wouldn’t hear any nonsense then, or smell the smell of fear coming out their mouths. Then you wouldn’t ask what colour the shirt was. Then our new shirt would sprout wings, or it’d be fitted with a motor that makes the person wearing it fly. A shirt that fits every one of us, thin ones or fat ones like me.’
I asked him, ‘So who do you think will win – the laundrymen or the inventors?’
‘Who are those inventors?’
‘The people who invent the Egyptian shirt that smells of jasmine.’
‘Look, the laundrymen who used foot-irons are long gone. It’s a trade that’s died out, extinct. Now the army’s trying to bring it back to protect the old regime, but the inventors are the future. My son tells me the jobs we have today will all disappear. The new jobs will depend on inventions and innovation, because my son’s in the faculty of engineering, may your children be as lucky. He got top grades at school and managed to get into the faculty, a fine young man who spent three weeks in Tahrir Square. His mother was terrified but I told her to let him be. “It’s his future,” I said. And when they started killing the young people, my heart sank but I took heart and told myself to be brave, because after all that it wouldn’t do to send the shirt to be ironed. Even if the laundrymen win for a short while, in the end the inventors will definitely win. Believe me, we’ll win in the end, even if we have a long way to go.’
Khaled AlKhamissi
Cairo, April 2011
One
My God, how old is this driver? And how old is this car? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I sat down next to him. The wrinkles on his face were as many as the stars in the sky, and every wrinkle pressed gently against the next, to make the kind of Egyptian face sculpted by the father of modern Egyptian sculpture, Mahmoud Mukhtar. His hands gripped the steering wheel, and as he stretched out or retracted his arms, I noticed the prominent veins, like watercourses nourishing dry land with Nile water. He trembled slightly but the steering wheel did not move left nor right. The car kept moving dead ahead, and from his eyes, beneath his giant eyelids, there emanated a state of inner peace, pervading me and the world with a sense of reassurance.
Just by sitting at his side, through the force field he emitted, I felt that life was good. For some reason I remembered my favourite Belgian poet, Jacques Brel, and how wrong he was when he suggested that any form of death was preferable to growing old. If Brel had sat next to this man, as I was now, he would have rubbed out that poem with an eraser.
‘You must have been driving a long time,’ I said.
‘I’ve been driving a taxi since 1948,’ the driver replied.
I hadn’t imagined that he had been in the trade for close to sixty years. I didn’t dare to ask how old he was but I found myself asking about the outcome. ‘And what, I wonder, is the essence of your experience, that you can tell to someone like me so that I can learn from it?’ I said.
‘A black ant on a black rock on a pitch-dark night, provided for by God,’ he answered.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell you a story happened to me this month so that you understand what I mean.’
‘Please do.’
‘I fell seriously ill for ten days and I couldn’t move from bed. I’m pretty poor and live from hand to mouth. After a week there wasn’t a penny in the house. I knew, but my wife was trying to hide it from me. So I say to her: “What are we going to do, missus?” “Everything’s just fine, Abu Hussein,” she answers, though she’d been begging food from all the neighbours. Of course my children have enough worries of their own, one having married off half his kids and unable to marry off the rest, another having a sick grandchild and running around the hospitals with him, I mean there’s no point asking them for anything. It should be me helping them. After ten days I said to the old woman: “I’ve got to go out to work.” She insisted I stay and kept yelling that if I went out it would be the death of me. To tell the truth, I wasn’t up to going out but I told myself I had to. I told her a white lie and said I would sit at the coffeeshop for an hour, for a change of air because I was going to suffocate. I went out and started the car and said: “O God, O Provider.” I drove along until I reached the Orman Gardens and came across a Peugeot 504 broken down and its driver waving at me. I stopped and he came up to me and said he had an Arab man going to the airport and could I take him because his car had broken down? See God’s wisdom here? He had a Peugeot 504 in prime condition and it broke down! I told him I’d take him.
‘The passenger got in with me and he turned out to be from Oman, from that Sultan Qaboos’s place. He asked me how much I would charge and I told him whatever you pay. He double-checked that whatever he paid I would take, and I told him OK.
‘On the way I found out that he was going to the freight depot because he had some goods to clear. I told him that my grandson worked there and could help him with the customs clearance. He said OK, and in fact I went and found my grandson there and on duty. Mind you that of course I might not have found him. We cleared the things he wanted to clear and I took him back to Dokki.
‘Again he asked me: “What will you charge, old man?”’
‘I said we’d agreed on whatever he would pay, and he gave me fifty pounds, which I took and thanked him and started the car. He asked me: “Satisfied?” and I answered that I was.
‘Then he told me: “Look, old man, the customs duty should have been 1,400 pounds and I paid 600 pounds. That makes a difference of 800 pounds that are your due, free and clear, plus 200 pounds as the taxi fare. Here’s 1,000 pounds and the fifty you have is a gift from me.”
‘See, that means one fare brought me 1,000 pounds. I could work a month and not earn that. See, God brought me out of the house and made the Peugeot 504 break down and set up all the elements for Him to provide me with this income. Because it’s not your earnings and the money’s not yours. It’s all God’s. That’s the only thing I have learned in my life.’
I got out of the taxi regretfully, for I had hoped to sit with him for hours and hours more. But unfortunately I, too, had an appointment, part of the same constant struggle to make a living.
Two
I got into a taxi on Arab League Street in front of the Zamalek Club and the driver’s face was flushed bright red as though he were about to explode. He was so angry that I really felt that a snake had found its way into his arteries and was writhing around inside, or that he would have a stroke on the spot.
‘Never you mind, it will all pass,’ I told him.
‘What’s that? Something wrong, sir?’ he replied.
‘You looked upset so I thought I’d tell you not to worry.’
‘I’m not upset, I’m going to die,’ said the driver.
‘But what’s the matter? There’s nothing in the world worth all that.’
‘Oh yes there is,’ said the driver. ‘I work my butt off to feed the kids and some bastard comes along and takes it from me. Then you tell me whether it’s worth it or not. Yes, it’s worth it. I’m worked to exhaustion, not like you, mister, all cool as a cucumber.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘You want to take out your anger on me? Just say what happened.’
‘I picked up a guy in Nasr City and he told me to go to Mohandiseen, and I said OK. The road was jammed and the flyover was completely blocked. I thought he wouldn’t take that into account but no problem, because it was me that didn’t fix a price with him in advance. When I came down onto the Agouza Corniche, he told me to turn into Sphinx Square and I did. He said: “Take the first turn and park here past Omar Effendi because we’re going to set up a checkpoint here.”
‘Checkpoint! What a disaster, I said to myself. Anyway, he turned out to be a police sergeant in plain clothes and obviously he wasn’t going to pay me anything. I stopped the cab and the next thing he’s saying: “Your licence and papers, you son of a bitch.” “But why, officer?” I said, “I haven’t done anything.” “Your licences,” he said and I pulled out five pounds. “That won’t do,” he said, so I pulled out ten pounds. “That won’t do,” he said. Anyway, he took twenty pounds and the bastard got out. By God, and I trust you’ll believe me, that’s all I had earned that day since I filled up with petrol. I could have easily throttled him but I thought of my kids and the old woman. But I’m an idiot, because now I’ll die from spite. I should have killed him, a death for a death.’
‘That’s outright thuggery,’ I said.
‘Thuggery big time,’ said the driver. ‘There’s not one of those sons of bitches who doesn’t take bribes or steal.1 May God destroy their houses just as every day they destroy ours.’
One of the most popular pastimes for Cairo taxi drivers is cursing the Interior Ministry, and respecting, revering and venerating it at the same time, because they – the drivers and the Interior Ministry’s traffic department – are always out on the streets. Stories in this area abound, but this story was a violent slap in the face.
I had often heard execrations of the policemen in my magical Cairo but I had never been as sympathetic as I was towards this poor man, the victim of this policeman.
A policeman with the rank of ‘Amin’ – literally, a trustworthy guardian – was a beautiful dream in the early seventies, an Amin on the streets in his smart uniform, walking along so elegant, proud as a peacock. Who among us does not remember the words of Salah Jahin in the film Watch out for Zouzou, when he likens the Amin to a diplomat?
How did this dream, over the last thirty years, turn into a nightmare haunting the streets of Egypt?
Three
One of the direct social effects of the opposition movement Kefaya2 on the streets of Cairo is that it pushed up the taxi meter rate on demonstration days. Of course by meter rate I mean the taxi fare because the meter is there just as an ornament to embellish the car and to rip the trousers of customers who sit next to the driver.
On that particular day I was in Shooting Club Street in Dokki and heading downtown, standing looking for a taxi. Whenever I waved to one and shouted out: ‘Downtown’, the driver would brush me off and keep on driving. That was strange. It took me back to the abominable days of the Eighties when finding Ali Baba’s treasure was easier than finding an empty taxi. You only have to look back at the cartoons of that period to see how taxi customers like me suffered from the ‘yellow duster’3 folded over the meter. Days I hope God never brings back! Now you wait for less than a minute to ride a beautiful taxi chosen from among dozens. Except that day, until one driver obliged, stopped and asked seven pounds fo
r the trip. ‘Why?’ I shouted.
‘There are demonstrations and the world’s turned upside down and it’ll take me an hour to get you there,’ he answered. ‘I tell you, seven pounds won’t be enough. I’ll do it for ten pounds.’ To cut a long story short, I agreed to pay ten pounds for the trip, for which I usually pay three pounds.
It was indeed impossible to move. The cars were bumper to bumper and on top of each other on the street, moving not an inch, as though we were imprisoned in a giant garage.
‘What’s up?’ I asked
‘Demonstrations,’ said the driver. ‘Dunno why. There are about 200 people holding banners and around them about 2,000 riot police and 200 officers, and riot police trucks blocking everything.’
‘All this crowd for 200 people?’ I said.
‘The crowd’s not from the demonstration, and it’s not much of a demonstration in the first place. In the old days we used to go out on the streets with 50,000 people, with 100,000. But now there’s nothing that matters. How many people are going to leave home for something no one understands? And the government’s terrified, its knees are shaking. I mean, one puff and the government will fall, a government without knees.’ He laughed out loud.
‘You think the government needs to eat kawarei4?’ I said.
‘Nothing to do about the government, puffed up with false pride. But the problem’s with us,’ said the driver.
‘How so?’ I said.
‘You know what was the beginning of the end?’
‘What?’
‘The 18th and 19th of January,’ he said.
I was stunned by this answer, which I was hearing for the first time. I had expected many conventional responses, but the 18th and 19th of January! This was new, and I wondered whether the driver knew that the demonstrations on those days, which President Sadat5 called ‘The Uprising of the Thieves’, took place in 1977. I really don’t know why this stupid question came to my mind but I put it to him anyway: ‘What year was that?’ I said.
Taxi (English edition) Page 1