by Zora O'Neill
“So, what will you do?” I asked him. “What do you think will happen? Can you trust the military?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his raspy voice trailing off. “But we’ll just keep fighting. It’s like a video game, when one monster comes, then another, and another . . .” He braced himself in his chair, tucked the sheesha’s mouthpiece under his arm, and held his hands up, karate-style, against an invisible opponent. “Now they’re releasing the Salafists!”
Hassan’s friend Moataza arrived. She was a bird-like woman with a huge mane of black hair and an equally huge Hello Kitty handbag. She was an actress of some repute, Hassan said as we shook hands. “People will recognize her while we are here, you’ll see.” Moataza spoke fluent English in a soft, high voice; she had been an exchange student in Atlanta.
She too pulled out her phone to flick through photos. In Arabic, nostalgia is expressed as shawq lil-madi, a craving for the past, or haneen lil-madi, grief for the past. Revolution nostalgia had kicked in, only nine months after the fact. On the faces of Hassan and Moataza—and so many other people I’d noticed huddled around laptops at cafés or standing on street corners peering at phones—I saw the same look of longing and sadness, as they attempted to revive the pure, uncomplicated hope of that time.
The extreme Islamic hard-liners, those Salafists whom Hassan had said he was prepared to fight, had been condemning Egyptian morals. Moataza composed her dainty features, trying to stay positive. “I went to the pub in the Marriott the other night, and it actually made me happy to see so many superficial people, listening to superficial music,” she said with a rueful sigh. “Any kind of self-expression now I am so happy to see.”
Hassan took a last pull on his sheesha and curled the hose around the bowl, readying to leave. He had another appointment.
Moataza invited me to walk with her to Tahrir Square, a few blocks away. It was Friday evening, the night that had become routine for demonstrations, though nothing special had been planned for today. “I just want to see what is happening,” she said.
As we emerged on the square, a muscular young man twice Moataza’s height sidled up to her. “Foto?” he asked, grabbing her roughly by the shoulder and trying to pull her into a pose in front of his phone. She turned on him, holding up her massive handbag as a barrier. “Don’t touch me!” she hissed. “I come here as a regular person, not a celebrity.” He backed away, spitting insults.
Moataza surveyed the scene on the square, and her face hardened. Clusters of guys idled, hands jammed in their pockets and shoulders hunched against the cool weather that had finally arrived with October. These were not the inspiring shabab of the revolution, aglow with solidarity and revolutionary ideals. These were shabab as defined in my old personal dictionary: aimless, frustrated, aggressive. A few roasted-nut sellers pushed their painted carts, the little chimneys on them puffing smoke, but no one was buying.
“Let’s go, Zora. This is not nice,” Moataza said softly, sadly. “This is people out for a picnic.”
After dinner a few days later, a journalist friend checked his phone, and his face clouded. “Five dead at protests,” he read aloud from his messages. “Watch yourself.”
Violent protests? Where? People streamed by, belying the message and whisking away its menace. The sidewalks teemed with activity as on any other night. Vendors shilled flimsy lingerie and fresh dates, football jerseys and paperback books, cheap wigs and motley-hued headscarves. I bade my friend goodnight and started toward the metro, picking my way around the vendors.
At 26th of July Street, I heard a clamor many blocks to my left, in the direction of the Supreme Court building. A cloud of dust made it impossible to see. I was tempted to gawk, but before I had left New York, I had solemnly vowed to my family that I would never walk toward a demonstration. I had already cheated by going to Tahrir Square on a Friday with Moataza—never mind there had been nothing going on. I took a right turn, putting my back to the noise.
From behind rose more shouting, closer this time. Then the pounding of feet: men were running past, down the middle of the empty avenue. Then came one panicked driver, tires squealing as he reversed crazily away from the dust cloud.
It was not dust, I saw as I turned to look again. It was smoke. I stopped, along with all the regular shoppers out on regular strolls, and together we stared down the street. Cairo was often described as chaotic, but there was an underlying system to its churning energy. Now that system had stumbled to a halt, and a chill had settled over the empty street. True chaos was somewhere up the road, behind that smoke screen.
“Fee eih?” a woman near me cried, a most basic question—literally “What is there?”—that really meant, “Is there something wrong that I should know about?” In a soap opera, it would have been the neighborhood gossip lady’s first line, a form of friendly prying. On the edge of this eerie scene, it was a plaintive expression of fear.
Some men running past shouted, “Ag-geish, ag-geish!” The army. In Hassan’s video game of the revolution, the Salafists were midlevel zombies, scary but slow-moving. The army was the most dreaded beast, the highest level, the battle no one wanted to fight. I crossed to the side street, toward the metro entrance, to get out of the way. More men were running out of the smoke cloud.
Two teenage boys stopped next to me to catch their breath. One, his arms damp with sweat despite the cool night air, noticed me gazing up the street. His eyebrows arched high, his eyes widened for emphasis, as he loudly tsked, that wordless “no.”
“Go there,” he said in English, pointing down the stairs to the metro. “Safe.” A long, searching pause. I recognized that pause, from my mitnerfiz freeze in class: there was more to say, but how to say it?
Finally he said, “Revolution.” Not jubilant, only practical. This was the long-term reality, beyond the initial eighteen days of unity; Egypt was now in a steady, slow-burning battle. The boys turned and ran on, and I went down the stairs to the metro.
On the train, I took a seat in the women’s car, where all was calm. I knew some terrible news, but I couldn’t tell anyone because I wasn’t sure what I’d seen. Would I say thawra (revolution)? Or fawda (chaos)? To soothe myself, I let my gaze skip across the serene faces of the women around me. Nearly every one was framed in a neatly arrayed headscarf, or in several stacked in layers. An apple-cheeked girl wore hers “Spanish style,” knotted at the nape of the neck, like the poor but plucky heroine of an old Egyptian movie. A trim woman with a toddler wore a tightly wrapped tiger-print scarf, continuing the theme from her sequined Garfield sweatshirt. The only woman in the car wearing a full-face veil also sported black nail polish and a punkish silver-studded bag.
The train doors opened, snapping me out of my fashion reverie; I remembered the panic on that downtown street. Something very big, possibly very awful, was happening, but my walk home gave no clues as to what it was. I had expected to see knots of men gathered in coffeehouses discussing the news or gathered around TVs, but the sidewalks and cafés were no more crowded than usual. At my apartment, the Internet wasn’t working, as sometimes happened. I crawled into bed, wondering if I had imagined it all.
In the morning, I learned that twenty-seven demonstrators, most of them Coptic Christians, had been killed by the Egyptian army and a crowd of vigilantes. Reporters on the state-run television station had summoned the mob, calling upon loyal Egyptians to “defend” the troops. It was by far the worst violence of the revolution. The words Hani had taught us welled up in me: anger, frustration, worry. Meanwhile, the sun shone, the traffic jammed, all as usual. Cairo was so big, it swallowed tragedy whole.
Hidden Fingers
A week after the fatal demonstration, I sat on a breezy apartment terrace with a group of resident American journalists, as well as Hamdi, the antiques dealer who had taught me about palindromes, and his wife, Melissa. The sun had set; the weather was balmy. It would have been
the perfect setting for a little Hassan-style Arabic banter, some Egyptian empty talk, had the specter of needless death not hung over our conversation.
We were still trying to be lighthearted. Hamdi had rolled a joint, and it made its way around the circle. We sipped beers from big green bottles.
“Did you see the Bassem Youssef show this week?” said a lanky American woman. “The one where he went off on the ‘hidden fingers’? That was a great one!”
“Hidden fingers”—unnamed, external meddling forces—were what the military council blamed for the deaths at the Coptic demonstration, and the comedian Bassem Youssef was having none of it. With a perpetually cocked eyebrow, Youssef, a heart surgeon turned TV personality, had been commenting on the revolution since the spring. Even in the context of Egypt’s longstanding love of humor, Youssef’s style of explicit, cutting political satire was something new. In the past, criticism of the regime and its allies had been bundled almost entirely in structured jokes, little parables told in the third person: “Mubarak, Netanyahu, and Yeltsin are on a plane . . .” The jokes were sardonic, distancing, and ultimately powerless.
But during the revolution, the demonstrators had spoken directly to Mubarak, brandishing signs in the imperative. Hamdi, collector of colloquial wisdom, had particularly liked the ones held by children: Leave, Already—I Have to Pee! and Pwease Weave, I Hafta Go Home! Bassem Youssef was the ultimate expression of this new revolutionary humor. He was on satellite television for an hour nearly every night, staring straight into the camera and saying precisely what he thought.
On the “hidden fingers” episode, Youssef delivered a long, sarcastic rant against the military council’s feeble excuses. Behind him, a trio of men in black echoed him spookily every time he said “hidden fingers.” By repeating the phrase, Youssef made it sound as absurd in Arabic as it did in English translation.
“Ooooh, hidden fingers!” the American woman said, waggling hers in the light that slanted onto the balcony from the living room, and the rest of us cracked up. The exception was Hamdi, the one Egyptian among us. Hamdi was normally the gregarious one, the life of the party, telling stories in his cigarette-scraped voice. Now he had sunk low in his chair, and from the shadows he growled, “Bassem Youssef should go to hell. He is not appropriate now.”
We turned toward him, in the darkest corner of the balcony.
“What do you mean? Bass, he’s funny, ya’ani!” Melissa said. She and Hamdi had lived together so long, they alternated Arabic and English phrases without noticing.
Hamdi hoisted himself up and into the light. His wicker chair protested as he leaned on the arms. “By the way, don’t you know people died?” he said, slowly and forcefully. “This is not a time for comedy and jokes!”
He glared at us, but something about his phrasing—and the weed we had smoked—sent us into peals of laughter.
“By the way, we know people died,” the American journalist said when we were quiet again. “But isn’t that just when we need the jokes?”
“By the way, she’s right,” Melissa said, reaching out to soothe Hamdi, who had slumped back in the shadows. “We’re not making fun of the people who died. It’s good to laugh and relieve the stress.”
I could see why Hamdi was angry. Not only were we Americans lecturing an Egyptian on the value of humor, but the military council’s brutality revealed a bitter truth: Egyptians had lost the power they’d held in the early days of the revolution. Or perhaps it had been an illusion and they’d never had it at all.
Although my husband, Peter, had visited Egypt several times before and was generally a happy, flexible, and uncritical traveler, he had never shared my fondness for the country. Now he was coming for a short stay, unfortunately just as political gloom had settled over Cairo. I decided we should take a weekend trip to the Coptic monasteries at Wadi Natrun. Perhaps in leaving the city, Peter might see another side of Egypt to appreciate.
At the Wadi Natrun bus stop, we were met by a battalion of Egypt’s newest form of transport, the tok-tok. The parts came from India and the name from Thailand, but the cheap auto rickshaws had become, in a few short years, a common sight in the Egyptian landscape. The drivers, always teenage boys, souped up their tok-toks’ beetle-black shells in ingenious ways, to resemble a Darth Vader mask, for instance, or a helicopter. My Badawi dictionary told me the verb taktik meant to tick or to jiggle the phone for a connection; years hence, it might be updated to include a new meaning, derived from tok-tok: to make the sound of a two-stroke engine, perhaps, or to pilot a vehicle without a license. Peter and I chose our ride by the best decoration, a slogan stuck on the windshield in dripping-blood letters: Need Fur Speed.
We squeezed into the cab, bags on our laps, and the kid gunned the motor and cranked the speakers behind our heads. “It’s Amr Haha!” I told Peter. Haha was the musical sensation that fall—not the usual slick pop star, but a lower-class kid whose tight, flat beats seemed to be designed for cheap speakers. As one of the Arab world’s texting youth, he preferred to spell his name “3mr 7a7a,” employing the trendy chat alphabet in which numbers stood in for Arabic’s unique sounds when thumb-typing on Latin keypads. One of DJ 7a7a’s most popular lyrics tweaked a Fusha revolutionary chant. In 7a7a’s Ammiya anthem, the people did not want the fall of the regime; the people wanted five pounds’ phone credit. “And it’s even better than the original slogan,” I told Peter, my captive audience in the tok-tok, “because it rhymes!”
Peter was unmoved. He peered glumly out at sand-caked weeds and cinder-block buildings. The only signs of life in Wadi Natrun were occasional clusters of kids on the roadside, who broke into flailing dance moves when DJ 7a7a’s beats washed over them. Our tok-tok deposited us at our hotel, a collection of shaky-looking huts edging a moat dotted with potato-chip bags and other trash. Peter looked wary; I pointed to the pristine blue swimming pool in the center.
Soon the owner appeared. He was a stout, affable man in a chambray shirt and a leather adventurer’s hat. He introduced himself as the General, shook our hands warmly, and showed us to our hut, relating his story to us in smooth English. He had traveled around Africa; he’d designed the hotel himself, inspired by tourist lodges in Kenya. Exercising his right as a police officer, he had claimed the land from a local Bedouin family.
At this last fact Peter’s eyes widened. I was startled too. In my little social pocket in Cairo, it was easy to believe everyone favored the revolution. Yet here, in the flesh, was a representative of the old system and its institutionalized corruption—the real “hidden fingers” that were stalling progress in Egypt.
“And have you seen the mosque I built?” the General asked, gesturing to a mud-brick structure on the far side of the property. It was elegant, but it towered over the Coptic village. “Look,” I said to Peter gamely, “those holes on the top of the minaret make it look like the dovecotes you see everywhere around here.”
In Cairo, I only noticed Coptic identity in an occasional cross on a chain around the neck, or a glimpse of a blue tattoo on the inside of a wrist. A young girl on the street once asked me my religion, and when I answered Christian, she turned my arm to look at my wrist, puzzled that I had no cross there. Here at the Wadi Natrun monasteries, though, some people wore their Christianity with gothic flair: large gold crucifixes set in cleavage, forearm tattoos of the Virgin Mary. A man with oiled hair sported a denim jacket with an icon hand-painted on the back, framed in metal studs.
Peter and I joined the crowd trying to enter a tiny gate in a very thick wall. Midway, the passage jammed. I felt like I was back on the bus in Faiyoum, as if I might be forever stuck in time and place.
Copts, roughly 10 percent of the population of Egypt, consider themselves the first Christians, converted when Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt with the Christ child to escape King Herod. When the Arabs conquered Egypt in the seventh century, Coptic was the dominant language. By
the twelfth century it had receded to use primarily in church, where it stayed. But in those critical centuries in between, the language acted as a vessel, carrying the ancient tongue of the pharaohs, from which Coptic derived, into the Arab era. The most essential Ammiya word, aywa (yes), came from Coptic; so did more specific words, especially for plants (barseem, clover), animals (balshoom, heron), agricultural miscellany (an ardabb measured 198 liters), even bodily functions (gees, a noisy fart). Some Pharaonic-via-Coptic words spread all over the Arab world: timsah (crocodile), waha (oasis), bisara (cooked beans), haram (pyramid). Tooba, the Coptic word for brick, traveled farther, to Andalusia, where it became “adobe,” and on to the American Southwest, where it became a style.
Inside the monastery walls, the crowds thinned slightly, and everywhere wafted the smell of feet in nylon socks—as in mosques, everyone removed their shoes before entering the chapels. As we paused by an icon of a gray-haired saint, adorned in a dickey, striped like King Tut’s headdress, a crew of schoolgirls spotted us, the only foreigners in the room. “Hello! How-are-you. Welcome-to-Egypt,” the head girl chirped in careful classroom English. “My name is Maryam. What’s-your-name?” I enunciated back, then saw a line forming, two dozen girls, each wanting to introduce herself in turn. Fortunately, a teacher intervened, and Peter and I swam against the human tide to the chapel door.
“Dimeera is another Ammiya word from Coptic,” I told him when we were safely in the parking lot. “It means the season of the flood.”