Eighteen Days of Spring in Winter

by Saeida Rouass

  It took a lot longer to get home as we were suddenly going against the traffic of people. We had to weave through groups as we left the Square and made our way up one of its main artery roads. At the top of it we hailed a taxi. It seemed taxi drivers had already figured out the best Square drop-off and pick-up points. The driver charged us triple the normal fare and we both managed to smile at the irony. We got back to our neighbourhood in the early evening. It too was a mini hive of activity. Residents stood around talking, windows were open and people peered out of them. Men nodded and smiled at my father as we passed them, trailing us with their eyes. No doubt, they already knew.

  We had come back empty handed. Climbing the stairs, I didn’t want to face my mother. I didn’t want to explain to her we hadn’t found him. Calling the police in the circumstances was laughable. We had to fix this ourselves, as with so many things now.

  Opening the front door we saw my mother sitting on the sofa, my brother wrapped around her sobbing. She looked at us with relief. Fear of her anger had prevented me from considering that while we were out she would worry about not just her son, but her daughter and husband too.

  No one spoke. In fact to this day we haven’t spoken of it as a family. I still don’t know where Salem went, why he cried and if he did join the revolution. The right moment to ask never presented itself.

  X

  Blinded by the lack of light

  Wednesday 26th January

  By Wednesday it was evident the protesters were intending to stay at Tahrir Square. There had been reports of looting and criminal groups roaming residential areas looking for a house to burgle or a woman to molest. My father’s fears quickly came true. Resorting to the law was not an option. There was no law, or law you could trust, except what you created on the street with the people around you. Self-reliance suddenly became a skill harnessed daily and trust changed its meaning. Suddenly you had to trust whoever presented themselves to you. No longer could you trust someone because you went to university with them, someone who was related distantly, or because they came from a good family. If the fruit seller on the corner told you not to go to the shop on the next road, but to go to the one around the back, you went to the one around the back and you trusted him. He trusted you. He had to continue at that corner selling whatever fruit he had. If he didn’t, his wife and children might not eat. He had already accepted he would experience the revolution from that corner, circumstance made it so. So he looked to you as a comrade, someone he could call on if that corner became difficult to hold.

  During those first three days the man who had stood on that corner most of my life, throwing me an apple on my way to school as a child, became the most charismatic and articulate news reporter you could ever meet. Rageh Omaar could have been standing in my living room, microphone in hand, reporting from Tahrir Square live and he would not have been able to match this man’s skills in hearing news and delivering it to the right people. It was he who suggested the neighbourhood watch. Slowly he presented the idea and then when enough men showed enough interest, which took a whole morning, they created a neighbourhood watch schedule. It was incredible how sophisticated this schedule was considering it had been devised on a street corner at the last minute. The men were put in groups, a patrolling group, an observation group, routes were figured out, lines were drawn marking the boundary of what we considered our neighbourhood. They instituted a shift system.

  By that evening it was obvious the shift system wouldn’t work. Someone came to our door to ask my father to swap his shift an hour after the meeting. My father agreed of course. By the time his shift came round the men on the original list were nowhere to be seen. Instead they too had swapped their shifts. So a new shift system emerged; of men just agreeing, with no need for structure. And it worked.

  The fruit seller became a crucial part of the neighbourhood, the eyes and mouth of the people. He reported messages between neighbours as they went about their day. He told my father about a baby in the next block with a high temperature. He told everyone what he heard about Tahrir Square, that protesters had been water cannoned. That those protesters dried themselves off and filled their pockets with stones and rocks to throw at the police. And how the police retaliated with tear gas. He told how the protesters covered their faces with whatever cloth they could find and bent to pick up the next stone. He told us of the 200 protesters being held not far from our home at State Security Headquarters and every time I heard a noise from outside I wondered if it was one of them. Their screams of pain rising above the noise of the neighbourhood and travelling all the way to my living room window.

  His reports filled us with hope and some fear. Mostly, they filled us with a sense that something was happening, happening because of us, not to us. We were making something happen and all it took was an agreement to do so.

  I am convinced a revolution is just self-organisation. A revolution is enough people deciding to do the same thing at the same time. And those people self-organising in an intuitive way, not a rational way. That was what was happening on my street that week. That was what I witnessed in Tahrir Square that Tuesday morning.

  But, I still felt like a spectator, a more supportive one, but nevertheless a spectator.

  My mother self-organised. She swallowed her pride and went to visit the other wives. She sat with them and drank coffee and by the end of that afternoon they too had developed a system of their own. They set up a small lunch service, a pot luck. They would each bring a small dish and one house would open up to the women’s families: husbands, children, grandparents. A plate would be made up for the caretaker and his son, the fruit-selling newsreader on the corner and the woman whose house it was would deliver it to them at their posts.

  And then it went black. In the middle of the night it went black. The power went out, the phone lines went down and the internet was nothing more than something you thought you had dreamt.

  We all knew what was happening and not because of Mustafa, the fruit seller. Even he knew this wasn’t news, wasn’t worthy of shouting out from his corner. Everyone knew what was coming, what we were building up towards.

  Friday!

  If a dictator is to be overthrown it will happen on a Friday. Even the government … regime … (the name was interchangeable at this point) thought so. They cut us off from the world by cutting the telephone lines and internet. They cut us off from each other by cutting the lights.

  The darkness was oppressive. Imagine the light pollution in a city like Cairo. There are some parts where you can go out at three in the morning and feel like it’s three in the afternoon. And to be suddenly thrown into natural darkness …

  Everyone had prepared. Candles ready and torches with new batteries, as it could happen anyway. But I still felt totally blinded when it came. So I stumbled to my brother’s room and lay next to him with a single candle on the bedside in case he opened his eyes to find he too was blind.

  XI

  The Day of Anger

  Friday 28th January

  Another Day of Anger.

  Thousands descended into Tahrir Square. The moment the imam ended the Friday prayer, feet started moving. Though some people did stay back to say a single prayer to a single God to supply a single moment of calm. I could have sworn the imams in the mosques rushed the prayer through a little. As I sat in my living room with the window open, the call to prayer seemed more frazzled than usual, as though the caller really had somewhere more important to be.

  I prayed with my mother in her room. We don’t usually pray together, but we decided to on that Friday. We prayed for each other, our family and the people we knew. We prayed for the people we didn’t know. We prayed for the men in the mosque opposite, kneeling down in unison, and the women beside them in the Square, to give them a dignified victory. I prayed they wanted those things too.

  Chaos. I felt it in my bones … in the walls. A noise descended that I hadn’t heard before. A noise of information. I picked up bits of informat
ion without partaking in a single conversation. It was all around me. I knew when the first rubber bullet was shot within five minutes of it missing its target. I knew when the cannons were switched on as if the police were using our kitchen tap as their main water supply. I knew when the tear gas filled the air with a suffocating smoke. I knew when the army were deployed. And I knew when the first protester of the day fell … I never did catch his name.

  I will forever remember hearing on state television how the army had surrounded the Egyptian Museum to protect its thousands of antiquities. And hearing from Mustafa how the protesters had joined arms with the soldiers who protected it. At that moment I knew I was with them. I knew it was my fight. They, the protesters, standing side by side with the army to ensure no one went in or out of the Museum, proved something to me about their intentions and allowed me to trust them a little more.

  The curfew was designed to give the regime further legitimacy to shoot people. If people defied the curfew they were criminals. Suddenly, we were all criminals.

  The curfew was a joke. My mother broke the law in the evening when she popped to the shop to see if they had any milk left. Mustafa, the fruit seller, broke the law by closing his stall two hours past curfew. He actually just moved it to under the stairs of our building. The neighbourhood watch patrol broke the law in order to ensure law and order.

  People weren’t flippant about it. After all, if the police saw you out after curfew they really might shoot. But the neighbourhood was out, choosing to ignore what was doomed to be laughed at from the beginning.

  Everyone except me. I wasn’t allowed out, beyond the building. The Wednesday and Thursday I had been allowed to join in with the neighbourhood. Sit with people, walk to the shop, but on that Friday I didn’t leave the house. My father did and my mother did that one time for the milk. Her first act of civil disobedience, directed at both the regime and my father.

  My father wasn’t home at the time. He returned from who knows where, long after curfew. We grilled him. Where had he been, what had he seen, who had he spoken to? We never asked him why he broke the curfew as it seemed like an antagonistic question. He was on patrol and things were still tense, we had to be extra cautious.

  The day had made its point. Mubarak was still in power, but the protesters were still in Tahrir Square. The line had been drawn.

  I asked him if he had been to Tahrir Square. His moustache twitched downwards, not upwards. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t been back and I won’t go back. It is one thing to protect your family and to protect your home, it is another thing to put yourself in a direct line of fire.’

  I was sick of his pretence. I was desperate to say to him. ‘Father, why are you keeping up this pretence? Is it to protect us? You are not the only man with a wife and a daughter to protect in this country.’

  Instead, I challenged him. ‘If we don’t put ourselves in a direct line, who will? And how can we live with ourselves knowing we never did?’

  ‘I can live with myself just fine thank you,’ he retorted. ‘I support this protest, I support those protesters. You think I don’t protest? I protest every day I go to the government hospital to perform surgery. The light in the operation room sometimes flickers, the supplies are low and the instruments are old. I protest every day by turning up and performing surgery. I protest that this man or woman’s life lying in front of me is worth living and worth fighting the system for. Is that not a protest?’

  ‘I’m sure there are people in Tahrir Square that need your help, baba, your skills. You don’t have to stand in the line of fire. There are other things you can do.’ I wonder why I am trying to persuade him to go, when really I want to persuade him to let me go.

  ‘Yes, I am sure there are people who need my help. But they chose to go to that place and should I just follow them, without checking first if it is a snake pit?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I reply, dented by my failure.

  ‘I am working with the neighbourhood people. I am defending my home, my community. That is my protest.’

  I understood what he meant, but I knew in the end it wouldn’t be enough.

  XII

  ‘On its soil I will die!’

  Saturday 29th January

  ‘When?’ the people shouted, after Mubarak uttered those words.

  The police officers imprisoned for the death of Khaled Said back on the streets after ‘escaping’. Two days after what would have been Khaled’s birthday the prison gates were either forced open from the outside or swung open from the inside, adding a final insult to those who loved him.

  Suddenly there was a new fear. The government thugs had arrived. I couldn’t see them, but people feared their presence. They were everywhere but nowhere, amongst the protesters and standing away from them, watching for the opportune moment. The problem with the thugs was that nothing about them told you they were thugs. They looked like everyone else. They could strike at any time, from any place.

  Eventually, after a few tense hours everyone relaxed. If there were thugs, they would soon have to reveal themselves in a crowd and then they too would be a sitting target. It was as though death, or the possibility of a good beating, no longer meant what it used to mean. Mohamed ElBaradei was wrong, the people hadn’t broken the barrier of fear. They had mocked it, laughed at it and then calmly stepped over to the other side.

  ‘We all know violence,’ they said.

  Over the next few days a new battle cry could be heard over the city. It grew stronger the less that happened. The army. Their position was unclear. They were a permanent presence at protest sites. ‘The people and the army are one,’ the protesters called. Not to Mubarak and the regime, but to the young man in army uniform standing on the top of a tank looking down at them. Reminding him they were one, that if he shot at them, he was shooting at himself, his mother or sister. The less the army did, the louder the cry.

  Sunday 30th February

  The cry was heard. I would have given anything to be in Tahrir Square on the 30th of January. Of all the days of the revolution to that point, that day would be my choice.

  Starting off quietly, Tahrir Square soon filled, this time with a group of state judges joining the protest. The protesters’ terms were laid down, clearly and divisively. They refused to even talk to Mubarak. The doors were open for talks with the army only. Ironically, these terms were made while Mubarak was in talks with his top army officials.

  In that meeting he ordered them to use live ammunition. They refused, telling the protesters not to fear them. F-16s flew over Tahrir Square twice. By the third time the crowds cheered them, waved at the invisible pilots in the cockpits.

  And people began to nest, to clean the Square, remove the garbage that had started to collect. Non-protesters went there to feed protesters. A state judge fed with a washerwoman’s koushary.

  The sense of solidarity had not been broken nor debased. It had been strengthened by a potential new ally in the army and people began to prepare for a dragged-out siege.

  I noticed a difference in my father that day too. He released the protective chains he had wrapped around us. He took me on a neighbourhood patrol. Probably because he thought my legs needed stretching, when it was the stretching of my mind causing the most discomfort.

  We walked around the designated route and talked. He was very good at patrol, took it seriously: subtly alert to who was around us, what was happening ahead and behind us. Yet, despite his alertness, despite the tense atmosphere, there was a normality to our walk. Conversation about the protest and revolution was mingled with other topics. We talked about university and my future plans. I told him about my course and how much I enjoyed it, that maybe I would be a teacher one day. He looked at me disappointed, but didn’t say anything.

  The pharaoh had spoken. He threatened us with his own death. We talked about that too. About what it meant. About my father’s hopes that it would end peacefully, that the old man would choose dignity in the end. He was honest with
me. He told me how his fears were continuously being quashed by the protesters, how he wondered if it was possible to have a united people and how the thought filled him with hope and also scared him. And how he sometimes wondered if he was going about it all wrong, if he should be somewhere else at that moment, with people not his blood, but who were willing to shed theirs for him.

  We reached the end of his shift at our building entrance. The caretaker stood up with his teenage son and shook my father’s hand. They retraced our steps, beginning their shift, their walk, their talk.

  My father stopped at the entrance door and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You said before you want to be a teacher?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, more curious than anything.

  I hesitated to think of an answer.

  ‘Because I think stories are important. Because I think fiction can teach us things that fact often fails to.’

  ‘So tell them!’ he replied, ‘Tell those stories. But, Sophia, tell your stories, not someone else’s.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, if you love literature then write. You can be in whatever field you want, just offer it the best you have and teaching, though noble, is not the best you have.’

  I loved my father. I loved him so unconditionally. I loved him because of his overprotective ways. I loved him because everything he did for us came from a good place.

  ‘I want to go to Tahrir Square,’ I told him, laying out my terms.

  ‘Sophia, do not make permanent decisions based on temporary feelings,’ he warned me.