‘In the seventies, around 1979,’ he said.
‘And why was that the beginning of the end?’
‘Those were the last serious demonstrations on the streets. In the sixties we did many protests and in the seventies before the 19736 war there were demonstrations everywhere. After that Sadat, God curse him wherever he goes, issued decrees that raised the price of everything. The world turned upside down. People understood politics and they went out on the streets and made Sadat go back on his word. At the time we heard he’d gotten scared and fled to Aswan and was saying that if he was indeed ousted, he’d flee to Sudan, the coward. My God, anyone could have seized power that day, but there wasn’t anyone, just a bunch of wretches wanting prices to come down.
‘In Nasser’s7 time we went on demonstrations that made a real impact and suddenly we would find him there amongst us in Tahrir Square. He hadn’t gone off to Aswan or even gone home. That’s what happened after the Defeat of 1967, can’t remember exactly when.’
‘I still haven’t understood why the 18th and 19th of January were the beginning of the end,’ I interjected.
‘After that the government realised that it had to get its act together, and that these demonstrations had become a serious threat to them. The 18th and 19th of January were not just anything, that was the start of a revolution, but you know what, it wasn’t completed. And since then the government has planted in us a fear of hunger. It’s made every woman hold her husband by the arm and say to him: “Mind you don’t go out. The kids will die.” They planted hunger in the belly of every Egyptian, a terror that made everyone look out for himself or say “Why should I make it my problem?”, so that’s why the 18th and 19th of January were the beginning of the end.’
Were the 18th and 19th of January really the beginning of the end? And what is this end that the driver was talking about with such simplicity and utmost certainty?
Four
I came out of the Galaxy Cinema after watching Yousry Nasrallah’s excellent film Gate of the Sun. I’d seen the two parts back-to-back and I was positively elated by this stunning work. My heart was racing and I felt like I was levitating two inches off the ground.
I stopped a taxi in Manial Street and before sitting down I asked the driver to take me downtown. ‘Get in,’ he answered faintly.
I got in, shut the door, looked in front of me and saw the cave scene from Gate of the Sun on the windscreen of the taxi, the only space that wasn’t taken up, and my heart filled with the beautiful music of my friend Tamer Karawan. Then, after a while, I realised that the car wasn’t moving and the road in front of us was empty.
I looked at the driver and found him in a deep slumber. I didn’t know what to do. Should I get out and leave him to sleep? I hesitated a while and in the end I touched his shoulder. He shuddered in alarm, then robotically put his hand on the gear lever and set the car in motion. ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked. ‘Downtown,’ I said. He apologised for his lapse but within a few seconds the car was veering off towards the left.
I looked at the driver and found his whole body was also veering to the left – he was fast asleep again!
I shouted in alarm and grabbed the wheel. The driver woke up, saved the situation and again apologised. I asked him to stop so that I could get out. He swore blind that he wouldn’t fall asleep again and that he would deliver me downtown safe and sound.
My elation from Yousry’s film had vanished and my heart had stopped fluttering. Instead a sense of anxiety and foreboding had gripped me, and indeed, before a minute had passed, I found the car veering to the left again and the driver’s body was leaning right towards me until his shoulder touched mine.
I shouted out again and he brought the wheel back to straight, assuring me hurriedly that he wasn’t asleep. Then he started talking to keep himself awake. ‘You see, I’ve been driving this taxi for three days now without a break. I haven’t moved from it once’, he said.
‘Three days? How do you manage that?’
‘Today’s the 27th,’ he said. ‘I’ve got three days left before I have to pay the instalment on the car. The instalment’s 1,200 pounds a month. Three days ago I gave my wife a solemn oath that I wouldn’t come home without paying the whole instalment. I only had 200 pounds towards it then and I haven’t left the car since the time I got in, except to piss, excuse my language. I eat in the car and drink in the car but I don’t sleep. I have to get the money and I have to pay it by the end of the month.’
‘But what use is it if you get the money for the instalment and die?’ I asked. ‘Because you could have an accident and end up dead, and take me with you too.’
‘The rogue has nine lives, and our lives are in God’s hands,’ he answered. ‘And yours truly is a real rogue. I’m nearly there, just some three days to go and I’ll have made the money for the instalment.’
‘OK, so why don’t you take a nap for two or three hours? It won’t make any difference. Make it three days and three hours, man.’
‘I swore a solemn oath, and you don’t understand, sir. We live from day to day, and meal to meal. I mean, if I went home I’d find a hundred and one disasters. I’d find the children hadn’t eaten and their mother at her wit’s end. No, sir, no way! I won’t get out of this taxi till I reach Ibrahim Issa and pay him the instalment and it’s all wrapped up. After that I’ll go home.’
Deeply troubled, I left him. After I got out of the taxi, I stood and looked at the car as it drove off into the distance, expecting at any moment that the driver would fall asleep and disaster would strike. But the car did not swerve as it drove off and disappeared completely from my field of vision.
Five
‘People wonder why the economy’s screwed up,’ the driver said. ‘It’s screwed up because of people. Would you believe it, a country like Egypt, the people here spend more than 20 billion pounds a year on telephone calls. Twenty billion pounds, I mean, if we didn’t talk for two or three years, would Egypt be different?
‘The people are crazy, I swear. People have nothing to eat and everyone’s walking around with a mobile and a cigarette in their mouth.
‘Men who should have brains and they spend all their money on these two disasters – telephones and cigarettes. And in the end they say it’s because the state of the country isn’t so good.
‘Everyone’s money goes into the pocket of four companies – Telecom Egypt, Mobinil, Vodafone and Eastern Tobacco.8 And the advertisements, God damn them, keep putting pressure on people to subscribe to Mobinil and not Vodafone. The world’s gone mad. Those adverts have to be banned. It’s a world of lies and we’re exposed to it all day and all night. You walk down the street and you see an ad, turn on the radio and it’s adverts. You go home and the television’s on, adverts, all of them disgusting and deceitful.
‘People act like sheep chasing after adverts and forking out money all the time, and in the end they tell us the county doesn’t have any money. How’s that? Then the billions spent on phone talk, where do they come from? Wouldn’t it be better if this money were spent on food and housing, education and health? But who’s listening? And our prime minister is the telecoms king9, no less, but it’s just a lot of empty talk!
‘But to be honest, the problem’s not with the government. The disaster’s in the stupidity of people who squander their money on phone calls and tobacco. If they put me in charge of this country for one day, even one minute, the only decree I would issue would be to ban advertisements.
‘In the old days, in our day, adverts were meant to serve society, and there weren’t so many, so few that you had to look high and low to find them, but now the adverts are out to destroy society and they will destroy it and sit on the ruins. Then you can say Abu Ismail told you so.’
Six
I have rarely come across a taxi driver who didn’t have experience of working abroad, some of them for long periods in several countries. This driver’s experience started in 1977 and continued until 2004, with some breaks, as he said. But as
soon as he came home, he would set off again. He had been to Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya and had passed through Jordan and Syria of course – real-life experience in one of Egypt’s main sources of revenue, the remittances of Egyptians living, or forced to live, abroad.
The driver was severely critical of the situation in Egypt and told me he had had his fill of empty slogans about loving one’s country and nationalist slogans like ‘If I were not an Egyptian, I would wish to be one’, talk that doesn’t take you anywhere nor achieve anything. He explained to me that he had been forced to come home two years ago for reasons beyond his control, and that those so compelled have a hard time. In his case a hard time meant living now in this filthy country, as he put it. All this was standard to a large extent, held nothing new and was common to a large group of drivers. But he told me stories about exile that were new to my ears, even after close to a quarter of a century listening to these hard-working folk.
‘You know the big difference between Sadat and Mubarak?’ he said.
Of course I didn’t know the real difference and I didn’t respond.
‘The difference, I tell you, is that Sadat took a great interest in Egyptians abroad. The man really protected us. But Mubarak, he’s a coward, he lets the foreign country do us over as it wishes and he doesn’t care. I’ll tell you a story or two so that you understand the manoeuvre (the word ‘manoeuvre’ didn’t mean anything at all in this context but that’s what he said). In the seventies Greece brought up the question of Egyptians entering the country by sea and it ended up with the Greeks screaming when they found that the number of Egyptians had greatly increased and lots of smuggling was going on. So what did they go and do?’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘They showed an Egyptian film, I think it was Abdel Halim Hafez’s My Father’s Up the Tree, in several of the cinemas in the districts that had Egyptians. Of course the Egyptians went to see it and halfway through the film the police raided the cinemas and picked up the Egyptians one by one onto police trucks, then deported them. They put them all on a ship to take them to Alexandria, because most of them were Alexandrians. Who should hear of this but Sadat, and the man went crazy. He spoke to the Egyptian ambassador and told him that as soon as the ship left port he should report it. The ambassador called him back and said, “The ship’s sailed, sir.” Sadat then spoke to the interior minister and asked him to pick up 100 Greeks straight away, and instead of deporting them by ship, he had them put on a plane.
‘When the Greek prime minister heard the news, he called Sadat, and Sadat told him, “What you do to my boys I’ll do to your boys.” Later he threatened him and said, “You haven’t seen anything yet.” All the Greek prime minister could do was contact the ship with the Egyptians on board and tell them to turn around and come back again. All the Egyptians on the boat went back to Athens, and they even gave them residence permits as well. Residence, imagine that! That’s a very well-known story. How come you don’t know it? That was Sadat, defending every Egyptian abroad.’
I told him that, although the story may be well-known, it was the first time I had heard it.
‘Well listen to this one,’ he said, ‘because there are lots of Sadat stories, but this one’s good. There was a tiff between Egypt and the Arab countries after that Camp David10 business. At the time I was in Iraq. Saddam was turning the world against Egypt and people started to give the Egyptians a hard time, but nothing serious. At the same time there were some skirmishes, you can say, between Iraq and Iran. The world was on fire. Sadat then called Saddam and told him: “Look, young man, we can disagree over politics, that’s fine, but if anyone touches one of my boys: no.” And there was a rough neighbourhood in Baghdad where lots of Egyptians lived called el-Murabbaa. So then Sadat said: “Saddam, I’ll set my boys in el-Murabbaa on you.” Anyway, Saddam understood that most issues were one thing, but if Saddam touched a single Egyptian, that was something else.
‘But ever since Mubarak11 came we’ve been kicked around in every Arab country. Today by the grace of this blessing (at this point he took a sandwich out of the glove box and waved it violently in the air), we are humiliated to the utmost humiliation.’
He punctuated the end of his rant by stopping the car as he said, ‘But even so, it’s better than being humiliated in our own country, here.’
Seven
We drove into Tahrir Square and found it transformed into a military barracks with the arrival of giant riot police trucks and large numbers of officers and policemen. This was about a month after the suicide operation, or the terrorist attack, or the idiotic, backward or desperate attack that led to the death of the attacker and injured some tourists including an Israeli, and that had helped create even more intolerable traffic jams in Cairo.
We turned into Ramses Street and I was surprised to see an endless line of riot police trucks parked on the right-hand side of the street. I looked with sympathy at those wretched policemen, stunted from poor nutrition, their bodies seemingly consumed by bilharzia. One of them gave me an imploring look through a small opening like the window of a prison cell. The driver looked at me sarcastically and asked: ‘Basha12, did you hear the horrible story that happened to the officer yesterday?’
I said no and he began the story. ‘They say one of the officers went in to see his troops in one of these trucks (he gestured to the riot police vehicles) and died from the smell!’ He then burst out laughing. I didn’t laugh myself and he carried on. ‘Can you imagine, sir, the smell of those wretches in this heat when they’re packed into the truck like sardines? They keep sweating and farting. The officer, poor thing, just dropped down dead, he died of asphyxia.’
I looked incredulous and asked him: ‘Did that really happen?’
‘Rise and shine, basha, it’s a joke,’ said the driver. ‘You looked grumpy so I thought I’d give you something to laugh about.’
‘I’m a little depressed,’ I said. ‘But I hadn’t thought it was so obvious.’
‘No one’s getting anything out of it,’ said the driver. ‘But listen to this one: A guy was walking through the desert when he found Aladdin’s lamp. He rubbed it and a genie appeared and said: “Hey presto, at your service, your wish is my command.” The guy didn’t believe his eyes and he asked for a million pounds. The genie gave him half a million. The guy asked him: “So where’s the other half? You’re going to fleece me from the start?” “It’s like this: the government’s got a 50-50 stake in the lamp,” the genie replied.’ The driver burst out laughing again and his laugh made me laugh more than the joke did.
‘You know, the government really does take about half of our earnings,’ the driver said.
‘How so?’ I asked.
‘Various tricks,’ he said. ‘Every now and then they dream up a new story. But the best one of all is the seatbelt story.’
‘What about the seatbelt?’ I asked.
‘The seatbelt’s a joke,’ said the driver. ‘A bad joke and it can only be a trick, a seatbelt for the driver and for the person sitting next to him, like in foreign countries, the sons of . . . And most people in this country don’t drive faster than 30 kilometres an hour, but what can you say, business is business.
‘Suddenly, just like that, sir, they tell you you have to fit a seat-belt and the fine is fifty pounds. Really expensive seatbelts then appear, you can’t find one for less than 200 pounds. It’s obviously a ploy big shots have cooked up, very big shots. Imagine, sir, how many taxis there are in Egypt and how many cars are driving around Egypt without seatbelts. Count it up, that’s a job worth millions, the perfect scam.’
‘Seatbelts are compulsory throughout the world,’ I said. ‘You have to fit seatbelts.’
‘What world and what crap? This is a son of a bitch government. You know right before that the seatbelt counted as a luxury, in other words you had to pay extra customs duty on it. I was importing a Toyota from Saudi Arabia and I had to cut off the seatbelts myself and take out the air conditioning so that I
wouldn’t have to pay the luxury customs duty. Then, no more than a few months later, the seatbelt was compulsory. I mean, straight from luxury and extra duty to compulsory. So we ran out and bought seatbelts and they did some good business at our expense.
‘The whole story was business on business. The big guys imported seatbelts and sold them and made millions. The Interior Ministry issued one ticket after the other and collected millions. The wretched cops on the street would stop you and say: “Where’s your seatbelt, you bastard?” and you’d have to slip him a fiver, and if he stopped you when an officer was there, it would be twenty pounds. I mean, everyone benefited.
‘And after that there’s something I want to tell you. I’m sure you know the seatbelt’s a lie through and through in the first place. Everyone knows it’s for decoration, we fit it just for show.’ The driver lifted up his seatbelt to show me it wasn’t fastened.
‘If the police officer stops you, he looks at the belt and he knows very well that it’s simply decorative. With seatbelts, you have to slam on the brakes to make them grip. But with our cars, when you hit the brakes, the seatbelt comes undone.’ He laughed aloud. ‘We live a lie and believe it. The government’s only role is to check that we believe the lie, don’t you think?’
Eight
‘Do you go to the cinema?’ I asked him.
‘The cinema, ah, it’s been a million years since I went to the cinema. Wait a second – I remember the last time I went to the cinema was in 1984. It was Cinema Cairo or the Pigale in Emadeddin Street.
‘After that life really minced me up. I became like Faragallah13 minced meat and since then I haven’t been to the cinema or the theatre, although I used to go to the cinema often at the end of the seventies. I was living in El-Geish Street. You know Mahmoud, the guy who sells salted fish?’
Taxi (English edition) Page 2