‘Have you heard?’ I said. ‘They’re finally going to launch the Capital Taxi this month and they’re going to cut into some of your business.’
‘They’ve been talking about that project as though it’s the project of the century for the whole country. They’re done with Toshka and now they’ve started on the Capital Taxi. Old man Nazif can’t talk about anything else, it’s become his favourite topic. They have cabinet meetings about it, with tea and coffee and soft drinks. They’re going to great trouble and I don’t know why. They say they’ll start out with 150 cars and they’ll increase it until there are 1,500 cars. Meanwhile in Greater Cairo, which is still the capital, there are already 80,000 taxis. How would you even notice them? That’s like putting a grain of sugar in the Nile. It reminds me of the story of the Lebanese president who went to China and the Chinese president said: “Why didn’t you bring the Lebanese people with you?’ Because no one would be able to see them among the masses here!”
‘At first I was anxious but months passed and then years and the government still couldn’t do anything as usual. Then when I heard the numbers and the prices I knew that it was only for show. Just to look good, like everything else in the country. The “Smile for the Camera” routine.
‘And the Capital Taxi is exactly the same as the limousine system that Jehan Sadat21 set up anyway. It was for foreigners only, which all goes to show that the government only cares about tourists and the rich, and we pick up the poor people that the government wants nothing to do with.
‘But the hilarious part is I heard the project kept getting delayed because of the radio issue, you know. The frequency, I mean. The cars are all meant to be linked together. The customer calls on the phone and on the radio they see which free taxi is closest to the address. Then they call up the driver and tell him to go there.
‘The police left the government to talk about it as though it were the project of the century. They left it until it was done and they had bought the cars and then they told them “Stop. That frequency is ours and only for us.”’
‘Just like someone who lets you park and stands watching you and after you get out of the car, he tells you: “You can’t park there. Move it along a little.”
‘That’s what happened. After they’d finished work on the project, they jumped on them and said it won’t do. It’s national security or my auntie’s security or whatever – in which case I suppose the “national” bit would be my grandfather’s!
‘Between you and me, I was delighted. Long live the police in the service of taxis. Let them go and stop their project.
‘Anyway, that project can go either of two ways, mark my words. Either it loses money and closes down, or it puts up its prices really high and then I don’t know who would use it, other than “international” people.’
Twenty-nine
The question of education and private lessons is right at the top of the list of Egyptians’ concerns, in a place shared only by the struggle to make a living. The two questions dominate the thinking of the great mass of the people, since Egyptian society is fundamentally family-based and children fill the Egyptian family with clamour, love, hope and, definitely, worry about the problem of education and private lessons.
To complete the cosmic cycle, every Egyptian struggles to make a living so that he can give his earnings to private teachers. Private lessons are like brand names. You can find them at all prices to suit every class and segment of society. Arithmetic lessons can be for ten pounds a session, and equally for 100 pounds. If your income doesn’t permit you to pay ten pounds, then there are remedial classes, group lessons and study centres, businesses in every shape and form.
With a driver who has children of school age, you only have to push the education button for him to set off like a rocket and no one can stop him, not even NASA engineers!
On that day in September 2005 I had paid the school fees of my three children and as soon as I sat down in the taxi, the money I had paid to the school still hot in the safe, I pressed the start button and off the driver went:
‘My children are going to give me a stroke. My only boy’s in the sixth grade primary and I swear he can’t write his own name but at the end of the year they help him cheat and he passes to the next year or else the school’s in trouble and gets cross-examined by the ministry. I also have two girls in secondary school, one in the third grade and the other in the second grade secondary.
‘Thankfully the girls are clever, but they cost me the earth in private lessons. I pay 120 pounds a month on each one. Imagine, each of them takes private lessons in three subjects and each subject costs forty pounds a month, enough to drive us to ruin double quick. As for the boy Albert, when he grows up, dim-witted as he is, how much will I pay on him for private lessons?
‘You know what we do? Evelyn, that’s the elder girl, gives him private lessons and gets money from me to pay for her private lessons. Because I have to teach her to make her own money through her efforts.’
He laughed.
‘But it’s clear she’s useless and doesn’t know how to teach anything. All she does is take money from me.’
‘But what about the school?’ I asked.
‘What school? I tell you he can’t write his own name. You call that a school? That’s what free education brings you. The veil of shame has finally been lifted. These days, if you don’t pay anything you don’t get anything. And the trouble is that we do pay anyway. In the primary school we pay forty pounds to get the books and in middle school and secondary eighty pounds and 100 pounds. Unless you pay there are no books. This means the system is: either pay or no books.
‘Education for everyone, sir, was a wonderful dream and, like many dreams, it’s gone, leaving only the illusion. On paper education is like water and air, compulsory for everyone, but the reality is that rich people get educated and work and make money, while the poor don’t get educated and don’t get jobs and don’t earn anything. They loaf around, and I can show you them, they can’t find anything to do, except of course the geniuses and our boy Albert is definitely not one of those.
‘But I am trying with him. I pay for private lessons like a dog. What else can I do? I say maybe God will breathe life into him and he’ll turn out to be another Ahmed Zewail22 who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Who knows?!’
Thirty
I consider myself extremely hostile to intellectual property rights, in light of the gap that grows every day, or rather every moment, between the developed world and us in the backward world, and because I believe that every path must be opened for the nation to which I belong to have access to the culture and the medicine it needs to confront the evil twins – ignorance and disease – that have devastated my society for centuries. That obviously will not come about by protecting intellectual property rights, which will make medicines affordable only to the rich and which will make culture a luxury that perhaps the rich themselves cannot afford. As a consequence of all this, I was sitting in a computer company having installed on my computer bootlegged software, because the prices of the original software are a bad joke. After I’d finished copying a large number of cracked programmes and installed them on my computer, I left the company offices in Qasr el-Aini Street to look for a taxi. While I was standing on the pavement, a shoeshine man came up to me. ‘Want a shoeshine, sir?’ he asked.
‘I’m waiting for a taxi,’ I said.
‘It’s two o’clock in the afternoon so you won’t find a taxi straight away. Have your shoes shined first and then I’ll get you a taxi. Besides, look sir, your shoes are very dirty,’ said the shoe-shine man.
‘Shine away, mister.’
‘Where are you going, sir?’ he asked.
‘I’m going to Zamalek.’
‘Could you take me with you, for the love of God?’
‘No reason not to!’ I told him.
‘God preserve you,’ he said. ‘Do you have any children?’
‘Yes, I have three.’
&n
bsp; ‘Snap! I have three too, one in the second year of the Azhar institute, but unfortunately he’s gone to Tanta in the Delta, one in the second grade at secondary school and the third of the brood is in the third year of middle school.’
‘You’re slightly ahead of me, but you look young, you don’t look old enough for that,’ I said.
‘I’m forty-five years old and I got married when I was twenty-one. But, God be praised, He has helped me prosper and the kids are turning out wonderfully. They’re all honour students and they come top of the class. What bothers me is that boy, whose marks meant he had to go to Tanta. But within the year he’ll transfer to Cairo,’ said the shoeshine man.
He took out a photograph of himself and his three children together. It looked like a recent picture and they all had broad smiles. The father was standing in the middle with his arm round his eldest son, who was standing on his right, and his other arm round his daughter, who was standing on his left. The youngest of the three was standing in front of the father, and his brother and sister each rested a hand on the shoulder of their little brother.
‘This is a picture my brother took for us,’ he said. ‘He’s been living in Saudi Arabia for nearly twenty years.’
‘Lovely picture, God preserve you.’
‘God be praised, He is very pleased with me. Everything’s perfect. The kids are growing up and flourishing. Does anyone in the world need more than that?’ he said.
‘Look, there’s a taxi. Zamalek! Zamalek! Are you coming with me?’
‘I’m coming, didn’t we agree?’
‘We did.’
So we got in the taxi. I sat in the front next to the driver, and he sat at the back and put his shoeshine box on his lap. The driver looked at the shoeshine man in disgust and then addressed me:
‘Are you together?’ he asked.
‘Yes, we’re together,’ I said.
‘What do you mean together? No. Each of you will have to pay a fare,’ said the driver.
‘I told you we’re together.’
‘OK, I’ll take seven pounds,’ he said.
‘Well, perhaps you might talk politely.’
‘That’s the way I am, rude. What’s it to you?’
Suddenly the shoeshine man got out and I got out after him, but he ran into the stream of traffic. I called after him but there was no reply. He disappeared into the midst of the crowd. I looked angrily at the driver. ‘What are you? Aren’t you a human being?’ I said.
Strangely, the driver didn’t answer. He drove off and I decided to walk the rest of the way to Zamalek. When I arrived, I found that my shoes were dirtier than they had been in the first place.
Thirty-one
When the distance is very short I don’t try to start a conversation with the driver, and this time I had got in on Arabian Peninsula Street in Mohandiseen, bound for Lebanon Square, a journey that takes less than three minutes.
The driver was listening to the song ‘Do you Still Remember?’ by the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kalthoum so this was another reason for me to hold my tongue and enjoy the song, for taxi drivers rarely play beautiful songs.
But this time the driver gave me no respite and asked me a very strange question: ‘Do you know what’s the most horrible thing in the world, sir?’
At first I thought he was joking but I could see that his face was serious.
I thought a while and answered: ‘If Egypt had been beaten yesterday in the match with Ivory Coast?’ This was the day after the final of the Africa Cup of Nations, which ended in an Egyptian victory at home over Ivory Coast, through a penalty shootout.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘There’s something much more horrible.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘That someone should fall in love with, excuse my language, a whore,’ he said.
‘Do you know anyone who fell in love with a whore and told you about it?’ I asked him.
‘Me, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m in love with, excuse my language, a whore.’
We had reached the Pasqua Café, where my sister and my cousin were waiting for me, but the driver had aroused the curiosity that lies within us like a burning fuse and, besides, he had a strong desire to tell his story.
The taxi stopped and I continued the conversation.
‘How did that happen?’ I asked.
‘Once I stopped for a woman in a headscarf, very respectable looking, about eleven o’clock at night, and she asked me to take her to Mohandiseen. That was at the end of August, about five or six months ago. I took her to Damascus Street and she told me to come back in two hours because she was visiting someone who was ill and she wouldn’t be able to get home that late, and may God reward me. I’m originally from the south and I thought this is a woman and the night is treacherous, so I agreed to come back in two hours. Then I went back and she came down and asked me to take her to Manshiet Nasser. I asked her for twenty-five pounds and she said she would go double and give me fifty because the customer was very generous.
‘As soon as she said “the customer”, I felt the word hit my eardrum like a rocket and pierce my skull, and my face dropped.
‘Amal, for Amal was her name, said: “I mean, what did you expect me to tell you? I mean, honestly, does any woman go visit someone sick in the middle of the night? Shouldn’t you be open-minded?”
‘So we started chatting and I felt sorry for the girl and I agreed to take her the next day to the same address at ten o’clock at night. To make a long story short, this went on for a week and after that she said: “Thanks, if you need anything, here’s my mobile number so give me a call.”
‘I don’t know what happened to me. I couldn’t think of anything but that whore and I kept saying to myself “prostitute, prostitute”. What made it worse was that whenever I was going down the street I would see her. I’d go and brake and find it’s some other girl but the same height, or some other woman in a headscarf, or even nothing like her at all. I thought I’d gone mad and that the girl for sure had cast a spell on me, so I called her on the mobile. When I saw her I found myself telling her “I love you”. Dunno how. She laughed out loud and said: “Do you want to screw or make out?”
‘I said I wanted to get married, and she said back: “Then you really are an idiot.”
‘And I don’t know what to do, sir. Imagine, a guy from southern Egypt like me, from Sohag, in love, deeply in love, with a whore. I think about her all day and all night. I see her image in every woman, I love her.
‘God spare you such a thing, because it really is the greatest curse in the world.’
I got out of the taxi and told him through the window: ‘So you didn’t screw, you didn’t get to make out and you didn’t get married, God help you!’
Thirty-two
We almost collided with several cars within a few minutes of setting off, and every time divine intervention saved us from certain disaster. The driver was a reckless youth with a shaved head, so thin he was almost invisible, his clothes loose and ill-fitting, probably because his size was to be found only in children’s shops. His face was pale from chronic poor nutrition and he was short of stature. His physical and medical condition reminded me of the horrifying statistic that 10 percent of the children in southern Egypt are mentally retarded because of malnutrition, and similarly of the report I’d heard on Egyptian Radio, which said the Air Force has a problem finding new military pilots, because all the applicants, with very few exceptions, are rejected for reasons connected with their physical or psychological fitness. The general in charge had said that this undoubtedly reflected the widespread malnutrition in Egyptian society.
This wretched driver was an excellent example of this phenomenon. But this was not the time to think about public problems because it looked like I might die in an accident within minutes. I don’t know how we hadn’t run into another car already. Thankfully we turned into a crowded street and came to a complete stop.
‘Where did you learn to drive?’ I asked.
&
nbsp; ‘In the army,’ the driver replied. ‘I just graduated.’
‘Graduated from what?’
‘From the army. I worked as a driver. I learned to drive and worked as a driver. We were based on the Suez road and I used to drive big army trucks,’ he said.
‘In the desert?’ I asked.
‘Yes, in the desert.’
‘I think you should stick to driving in the desert,’ I said. He didn’t get the joke and he went on talking.
‘The army, those were the best times. I spent three years there and I don’t think I will ever see better days, companionship and friendship, because now I have so many friends, real friends, I mean men you can find when you need them. Frankly everything I know now I learned from the army, not just driving, no, everything, The army’s a real school, a school that produces men. After my military service was over, I wanted to volunteer but then came the story of this taxi and that distracted me a little.’
‘You wanted to volunteer!’
‘Yes. It’s a great life, steady salary and there’s nothing better than a government job – even at the bottom of the ladder.’
‘And if you did volunteer and got your government job, how much would you make?’
‘A very good salary. I mean around 350 pounds a month. Who else can earn that much? But, you know, the taxi distracted me a little.’
‘Do you make good money with the taxi?’ I asked.
‘I really don’t know. What I earn I spend straight away.’
‘How much would that be?’
‘I’ve never worked it out,’ the driver said. ‘I make a pound, spend a pound, make ten pounds, spend ten pounds. I’m fatalistic about it, and by the way there’s not a single taxi driver in Egypt who can tell you how much he earns. It’s all in the hands of God.’ The traffic began to thin out gradually and I was worried about continuing my journey with this driver. ‘He who fears survives,’ I said to myself. I got out of the taxi and began to look for another one.
Taxi (English edition) Page 7