Thirty-three
This driver was angry, very angry. In fact, I’d say that he was in a rage. He was shouting in my face as though I were the cause of all his problems.
He was a young man of about thirty and looked like he’d been to university. I tried in vain to calm him down and in the end he told me why he was angry.
‘Yesterday they pulled my driving licence and what did the guy say? He said I was talking on the mobile. I swear I wasn’t talking on the mobile, I was only holding it. I tried to get the licence back through a contact of mine but the checkpoint had gone. This morning I made a trek to the Nikla traffic department at the end of the world because we taxi drivers are scum and they have to throw the department that deals with us to the far end of the world, then the guy who handles the papers said the licence hadn’t reached the department yet. They wasted two hours of my work time yesterday and two hours today, and still no licence. I’ve yet to see how much I’ll pay and how much I’ll have to beg to get it back. Drives you crazy! And at the traffic department it’s packed and at every step you have to cough up money and pay bribes, it’s disgusting.
‘I don’t understand what they want from us. There are no jobs, so we decide to do any job that’s going but they’re waiting in ambush for us whatever job we do. They plunder and steal and ask for bribes and where it all leads I don’t know. Just as I spend so much a day on petrol, I have to put aside bribe money for the traffic department every day just in case.
‘Well in the end we’ll all give up and push off like everyone does. It’s clear that’s the government’s real plan, to make us all push off abroad. But I don’t understand who the government will rob if we all push off. There won’t be anyone left to rob!
‘I really don’t understand what the interior minister, before he goes to sleep at night, thinks he’s doing to us. Does he realise that we’re educated, well brought-up people, and how much our parents suffered to educate us? Does he realise how much we’re abused by his policemen on the street? When his head’s on his pillow, does he realise that we’re done for and we can’t go on and we’re going to explode? We really can’t take it. We’re killing ourselves to make a living, and the Interior Ministry treats us as criminals, and liars of course. We’re all liars as far as any police officer is concerned. It’s clear they teach them that at police college, that human beings are born liars, live as liars, breathe lies and die liars. When I told him yesterday that I wasn’t talking on the mobile, he said: “But look, you’re holding it in your hand and you were talking.” He didn’t think for a moment that I might be telling the truth. The truth! How could I tell the truth when we’re all liars and we’re bastards and we have to be beaten with old shoes? I really feel that we aren’t human beings, we’re old shoes.
‘What do you think, sir, am I a human being or an old shoe?’ He looked at me expecting an answer, and I couldn’t help laughing, because his rage was so intense that it called for laughter and perhaps tears too. Then I apologised and said: ‘A human being of course.’
In the end he said: ‘One worry makes you laugh, another makes you weep.’
He apologised for having vented his anger at me, explaining that I was the first customer he picked up after coming back from the traffic department.
After he had calmed down a little, he said: ‘Do you know what’s the reason for the whole problem?’
I asked the reason and he said with a laugh: ‘The story is that as I was driving along I got a text message and I looked down and found it was a joke, and I laughed out aloud as I was coming up to the checkpoint. They thought I was talking on the mobile. A joke caused me all this shit.’
‘And what was the joke?’ I asked.
‘We thank all those who voted yes in the referendum and we give special thanks to Umma Naima23 because she voted yes twice.’
Together we burst out laughing.
Thirty-four
I was on my way to Heliopolis where I had an important appointment at the Armed Forces public relations department to get permission to film in front of the reviewing stand where President Sadat was assassinated back in 1981. The appointment had been arranged a long time before and I did not want to be late, so I went at least half an hour early.
I took a taxi from Dokki and we took the Sixth of October Bridge. The traffic was heavy as usual but I was feeling smug about the way I’d planned it. By about the time I had expected to be there, we had reached Salah Salem Street, and as we approached the exhibition ground the traffic came to a complete halt. I wasn’t very worried but the waiting dragged on and the minutes passed slowly and we started to ask the cars nearby what the reason for all the traffic was. They told us that President Mubarak was making an excursion. OK, I thought, may he arrive safely, and in a few more minutes the road would clear.
We were sitting in the car, which by some magical power had been transformed into a rock wedged in the middle of the road, unable to move a fraction of an inch, even if Hercules had been pushing. After we’d been waiting close to an hour, I decided to pay the driver the fare and get out and walk, for no doubt, I thought, walking would be better than sitting. As soon as I started to get out, a police officer approached me and prevented me from getting out.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘It’s forbidden, sir,’ he said. ‘You have to stay in the car.’
‘What do you mean? This is a street and I want to walk in the street,’ I said.
‘It’s forbidden, sir. Get back in the car.’
I got in the taxi dejectedly and the driver laughed. ‘So you wanted to leave me in this mess! See what God does,’ he said.
‘I was trying to make my appointment,’ I said.
‘Forget that. This is one big jam. Once I was stuck here for four hours without moving.’
‘Oh my God, four hours!’
‘That day I got out of here, took the car back to the owner, paid him everything I had on me and told him, “Never mind, I’ll give you the rest tomorrow.” I went home and I swear we all went to bed without dinner. My wife and kids had been waiting for dinner, like every day, and I came home empty-handed. My wife cried and put the kids to bed. I stayed by the window listening to the Quran to calm down.’
‘So what are you going to do today?’ I asked.
‘That depends on you. You could compensate me for however many hours we get stranded here.’
‘So that whole story was so that I’ll pay you for today?’
‘No, I swear on the Holy Quran. What I’m telling you is the honest truth, and if you don’t want to pay more than what you’ll pay that’s OK by me. But stick around to help pass the time.’
We sat for three hours, passing the time of day. He told me how he once loved Cairo with a passion, then he began to like it, then he began to have conflicting feelings about it, then he disliked it and now he loathed it.
In the end he told me about twenty jokes and I told him just as many back. Unfortunately I can’t tell you them because any one of them would be enough to send me to prison for slander, although I don’t see why I should go to prison because of jokes that most Egyptians know, circulate and laugh at daily.
And of course since I don’t want to go to jail, suffice it to say that we laughed a lot – even if I did not make my appointment. Since then I learned never to feel smug like that again.
Thirty-five
‘This is Cairo and here is the news.’ Then the newsreader, of course after saying in detail what President Mubarak had done during the day, regaled us with countless incidents and explosions across the world, in Israel, Iraq, India, Pakistan and the Philippines.
‘Why do they insist on thinking we are mentally retarded and drooling idiots who haven’t left the nursery yet?!’ said the driver.
‘Ever since I remember, whenever some disaster takes place, they bring us news of the same disasters from all over the world. If we have a train crash then suddenly for days we hear about every train accident that takes place anywhe
re in the world.
‘When the plane crashed in Sharm el-Sheikh or was shot down, they told us about every plane accident in this world and the next world, even accidents with crop-sprayers.
‘This time after the terrorist incident in Tahrir Square they’ve been rubbing our noses in incidents from all over the place. Yesterday I heard that someone was walking down the street in America and he shot some other guy in the street. As you can see, that’s a major incident. Tomorrow they will tell us there have been terrorist operations in Cloud Cuckoo Land and in the country where they ride elephants.
‘Then the woman who presents the children’s programme comes on and tells us on the radio in her “Drink up your milk before you go to bed” voice and gives us advice in her sympathetic mother voice as though people still haven’t given up wearing their bibs.
‘I’d like to know if perhaps someone once told the minister of information, this one and the one before him and the one before him, that we are mentally retarded, or maybe they told him we were still attached to our mother’s breast!
‘And then they don’t give up. Every time it’s the same story repeated, until you no longer want to listen to the radio or read the newspaper.
‘Between you and me, we’re also fed up with news about the president. Every news bulletin, it’s the president met So-and-so or phoned So-and-so, or So-and-so called him on his mobile. What’s it to me who he spoke to or what he went to inaugurate? But the news that matters to us, there’s no mention of it. It’s disgusting. Everyone who wants to kiss arse kisses arse at my expense. I think they should do bulletins that have serious news and other bulletins that have bullshit news and call it just that, so that the president can listen to the bullshit bulletins and then promote the people who write them, while we listen to the rest of the bulletins.
‘I’d really like to tell the minister of information we’re a thousand times cleverer than him and understand the world a hundred times better than him. But where would I see the minister of information to tell him that? What do you say I send him a telegram? Or might they arrest me if I sent him a telegram? What do I care that this used to be our country? Now it’s their country and they do what they like with it! I’d better just stick to the taxi.’
Thirty-six
In the government newspapers today they published the pictures of the people who have applied to stand in the presidential elections, with a short biography for each of them.
‘I tell you,’ said the driver. ‘I’ve never in my life laughed like I laughed today. When I saw the newspaper and the pictures of the candidates I laughed till I cried. They look like Ali Hoksha and Susu el-Aaraj24. It’s really enough to make you die laughing. They’ve brought people no one has ever heard anything of.
‘You’d find that even their mothers haven’t heard of them, not even that clown guy they keep blowing up till he’s the size of a balloon so they can say that even Mr Balloon is standing in the elections.25
‘Do you know why these people are in this game?’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘They say, and God alone knows the truth, that absolutely no one wanted to stand, because it’s not a game for anyone other than the government. Why would they stand? The government wants to appear to the Americans as though it’s democratic so that the aid money doesn’t stop and the economy doesn’t collapse, so they’re putting on this show. Very well, but where will they find people to act in the play, because in the first place we don’t have any actors of that kind to act in comedies. So they called in the big director, that’s the guy who makes lots of television serials and understands these things. He said the government would give money for election advertising for every candidate, because the actors have to get their pay, the actor Yehia el-Fakharany gets paid, doesn’t he?
‘Several customers have told me figures but every one says something different. One of them told me the government will pay every candidate a million and another told me three quarters of a million. Of course they’ll spend a quarter of that money on advertising and put the rest in their pockets and come home from the fair with some goodies.
‘The big joke one guy told me and we had a good laugh about it – that one of the candidates standing against Mubarak to get his share of the pie said that he himself would nominate Mubarak. I really didn’t believe him but the man swore to me that he really said that. Since Adel Imam’s no longer funny and he only acts for the Arabs, and people have stopped watching him, and Mohamed Henedi’s26 films are useless, they said ‘Let’s put on a show for the summer, to make people laugh instead of them sulking!’
‘Did you see the pictures in the paper today, sir?’
‘Yes, I saw them,’ I said.
‘Didn’t you laugh?’
‘Honestly I didn’t recognise a single one of them, and obviously that’s ridiculous.’
‘Frankly I don’t like Mubarak and I said I’d be for anyone who stands against him in the elections, but after I saw the people standing against him I said no, Mubarak’s still the best of them, I mean it’s not a question of the best but he’s the only one that anyone could vote for.’
‘So you’ll go and vote for him?’ I said.
‘No, I don’t vote for anyone, I meant those who do go and vote.’
Thirty-seven
Incidents of taxi drivers being cheated are common and I’ll tell you two stories on the subject. The first I heard when I got in a taxi on the Nile Corniche outside the television building, heading for Mounira. The quickest way was for us to cut through Garden City. The driver was trying to find another route but in the end he reluctantly agreed to my plan.
‘Why? Have anything against Garden City?’ I asked. ‘You’re a Zamalek27 fan?’
‘No really, I don’t support any football team, not even Zamalek, and I don’t care either way. It’s just that I don’t like going down that street,’ the driver said.
‘Why?’
‘Because I was conned there last month.’
‘How?’
‘A very stylish man got in the taxi, looked like he came from a good family, very well dressed. He got in in Zamalek and told me to go to Maadi. I said fine and off we went. Then he said: “If you don’t mind I’d like to go into Garden City to get some medicine for my sister. Just a second and we can drive on to Maadi.” “No problem,” I told him. We went into Garden City and stopped in front of a pharmacy. He got out and came back a minute later. “We’ll have to go back to Zamalek, or go to Maadi and come back quickly because I found that I don’t have my wallet on me.” “No problem,” I said, “Don’t you live in Maadi?” “Yes,” he said. So I said: “I’ll pay for the medicine for you now and when I drop you off in Maadi then you can pay me back.” The medicine turned out to cost forty-two pounds and I gave him fifty. He bought the medicine and came out of the pharmacy with a bag, and just down the road he had me stop in front of a building and said: “One second and I’ll be back.” I stayed there waiting about half an hour. Nothing. I went in to look for him. Nothing. I went to the pharmacy and told them what he looked like. The doctor told me: “Yes, he bought some aspirin for fifty piastres and insisted on taking a bag so that he could remember the name of the pharmacy.”
‘Ever since I’ve hated coming down this street, because it reminds me of what an idiot I’d been.’
As for the second story, it’s pretty standard and a large number of unfortunate drivers may have fallen for it lock, stock and barrel. But the driver who told me this story was a veteran with long experience of driving, not of criminality. He had been in the profession since 1966. In brief, the story is that a passenger asked to hire the taxi for half the day for 100 pounds. The driver accepted the offer, rather than spending the day driving around the streets. The driver drove him from one end of Cairo to the other and in the end he stopped in front of a building and asked the driver to wait for him five minutes. Of course the driver found out in the end that the building had another entrance.
That day and for
the first time in many years, the driver cried at his stupidity and his wasted effort. He wasted the rest of the day looking for a relative to lend him the rental money he had to pay the owner of the taxi for his shift, which was fifty pounds. ‘The owner of the taxi I work on, is it his fault that I’m stupid?’ he told me.
The veteran driver told me: ‘The world now is fish eat fish, big and small, all snatching and grabbing.’
Want and poverty have turned humans into fish far and wide. The stench of rotten fish fills my nostrils wherever I walk in Cairo. Now I have started to see fish turn wild in the ponds, in the swamps and in the sewers that run along the roadsides, preparing to pounce on me at any moment.
Thirty-eight
I was in Safir Square in Heliopolis. One taxi passed by, then another and then I stopped the third. As soon as I was seated next to the driver he started questioning me on why I hadn’t hailed the taxis that were right in front of him. I told him that I don’t much like new cars like Suzukis and Hyundais because they are too small for me. I prefer old cars like the Fiat 1400 or the Peugeot 504 and the like.
The driver was nostalgic about the old days, the days when a taxi was something precious, while now he drives round and round dozens of times before he can find a fare.
‘It all began when they issued the decree that any old car can be converted into a taxi and then every Ahmed, Mahmoud and Mohamed went and turned his car into a taxi. Taxi driving became the trade of those with no trade, it really is a disaster.’
‘When did that happen?’ I asked.
‘That was in the mid-nineties. Suddenly everyone could do it. Really, I know people who had cars fit for scrap and they turned them into taxis. And at exactly the same time in the mid-nineties they set up a ministry of the environment and it started saying that the old cars were polluting the air and emitting tar that got into the lungs. They sent people out on the streets to measure exhaust emissions and they gave us hell, and in the end they couldn’t do anything about us.
Taxi (English edition) Page 8