Taxi (English edition)

by Khaled Al Khamissi

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Anywhere. Just get me out of here!’ I said.

  ‘I’m going in the direction of the university.’

  ‘Then go,’ I said.

  The driver did not set off as I had hoped, for the road was packed with dozens of minibuses without number plates, driven by devils of the tarmac. On my right I saw a boy about five years old come up to a slightly older girl and take her hand so she could help him cross the crowded street. He seemed frightened and part of his uniform was ripped. She seemed confident that she could find a way safely through the vehicles with this boy.

  I too felt safe and my tension at the chaos subsided.

  ‘See how sweet the kids are?’ I said.

  ‘They sure are sweet, but their parents are mad,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re mad sending their children to school.’

  ‘What do you expect them to do with them?’ I said.

  ‘The kids go to school and don’t learn a thing. The parents keep on coughing up for private lessons from the age of ten upwards. In the end the parents are penniless and the kids don’t find jobs. I mean, it’s sheer stupidity.

  ‘Then you find those kids filling the streets all day long as you can see, kids going to school, kids coming back from school, petrol and pollution, dirt and noise for nothing.

  ‘Me personally, and a few of my friends with me, we pulled our kids out of education after primary school, and we save their private lessons money for them. When the boy or the girl reaches twenty-one, we’ll give them all the money we would have given to the private tutors. I swear it’s better for the kid to start his life with a little money in hand, rather than with some meaningless education – education that didn’t teach them anything in the first place.

  ‘I personally tell everyone around me, don’t send your kids to school, don’t send your kids to school, like it was my only mission in life.’

  ‘But my parents,’ I said, ‘they spent everything they had on my education and they didn’t leave me any money, and through my education I’ve been able to work and live.’

  ‘That was in the old days,’ said the driver. ‘That was in the sixties. Today the only motto is “Get smart, make money”, and for your information 90 percent of people live off business, not from anything else.

  ‘We’ll leave our kids some money to open a small shop or a kiosk or as an advance payment on a taxi.

  ‘Today there’s no industrial training that’s any use or any agricultural training that’s any use or any business training. And don’t forget that kids, poor things, expect the best and think that they are well and truly educated, when they don’t even know how to read. The only thing they learn in school is the national anthem and what good does that do them?’

  Forty-four

  The jinn29, spirits, angels and our brothers underground do exist, for they live in the consciousness of every Egyptian in one way or another. Talking about the jinn is definitely not nonsense, because they are part of our religion, our history and our folklore. In the end the jinn are embedded in our psyches in the same way mashed beans are mixed with herbs in the blender. In spite of this strong admixture, the jinn generally do not intrude on our daily lives, other than in instances that our feeble intellects cannot readily understand. When they decide to appear, then the outcome is as unfortunate as it was for the taxi driver who took me to the Sultan Hassan mosque and who asked me to pray for him in the mosque. Then he told me his story:

  ‘Why don’t you believe me?’ he said. ‘Yet you believe what they say at school, or on the radio and on television, but you shouldn’t believe that. Believe what ordinary people say. The jinn exist and live with us. My rotten luck is that I live in the flat I was married in. This is something we’ve seen confirmed a hundred times. We’ve tried to frighten them away every possible way but it’s no use. As for us leaving the flat and moving to another one, that would cost a packet, no less than 4,000 pounds, of which I have about four pounds.

  ‘A week ago my wife said to me “Look, man, at the beginning of next month, if you don’t find a solution to this disaster that has struck us, I’m up and out of this haunted house.” Well, how can I find a solution? And the bitch knows full well what the situation is.’

  ‘How did you find out that the house is haunted?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean how did we find out? It’s as clear as the sun at noon.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Please explain,’ I said.

  ‘The first thing is when we wake up in the morning we find drawings on the wall, the same colour as the wall, but there’s a damp line that’s made the drawing. Lots of drawings but mostly eyes, big eyes and small eyes. Then at the end of the day the drawings disappear. The second thing is the house is full of geckos. Do what you can, you find geckos everywhere, geckos of every shape and colour, and colours, I tell you, you’ve never seen before. Yesterday night, for example, I saw a large gecko that was dark purple. Have you ever seen purple geckos? Lots of things. I mean, the strangest thing is the story of the female animals, no females will stay in the house.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘We keep birds. We put two male birds and two females together. We wake up in the morning and find the two females have escaped from the cage. How did they open the cage? How did they fly away? We don’t know. Well, if the cage opened, why didn’t the males fly away too? It’s inexplicable and again it hasn’t just happened once, no, more than once.

  ‘Then we brought in one of those women who understand the supernatural. As soon as she came into the flat, she said the house is haunted. We hadn’t told her anything. She knew straight away that there were jinn living in the house. Then what made matters worse with my wife is the woman told her it’s taking her so long to get pregnant because of this problem and as long as we live in this house we won’t have any children at all. That was a month ago and ever since then my wife hasn’t wanted me to come near her. She says to me “What’s the use, big boy?” And she’s sworn an oath I won’t touch her until we leave this haunted dump we’re living in.’

  ‘So the old woman didn’t say why the jinn are living with you in the house?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, she did. She said the house was the jinn’s in the first place and that they won’t leave it, even if you went in banging drums. She even refused to take any money and she didn’t even drink her tea. She told my wife “Go and cut your nails because the jinn come out through them.” Then she whispered something in my wife’s ear and for the life of me she adamantly refuses to tell me what she told her.’

  ‘Can all this really be true?!’ I asked.

  ‘After everything I’ve told you and you still don’t believe me. I tell you, we go to sleep and wake up to find drawings of big eyes on the wall. Who’s drawing them then? Is it my mother who’s drawing them? The jinn exist. Don’t let education mess up your mind and thank God that your house isn’t haunted.’

  ‘Thank God,’ I said.

  Forty-five

  About an hour before Friday prayers the streets of Cairo are almost empty. At that splendid time I was heading to Rihab City to visit a friend and the taxi driver chose to go via Salah Salem Street by way of Abdeen Square. At the corner of the square a football suddenly flew in front of the taxi and out of nowhere sprang a young man running behind it, looking at nothing but the ball. We hit him and the jolt threw the young man at least three yards. When he landed he set off after the ball again, as though nothing had happened.

  I asked the driver to stop to make sure the young man was OK but the driver refused and kept on driving at speed. ‘Look, you can see for yourself, he’s running like a little devil,’ the driver said.

  ‘We should have taken him to hospital. It may be that right now he can’t feel what happened to him,’ I said.

  ‘You think if something had happened to him he would have run off like a deer in flight like that? It w
as a light blow and Our Lord kept him safe. Besides, if we went to the hospital it would be a whole palaver and we would never finish. Those people at the hospital would jump at the chance to act the bleeding heart, when in fact they’re the ones who give us hell at every turn. As far as they’re concerned, humans aren’t worth anything, not even a cent. Didn’t you see what happened with the ferry that sank in the Red Sea?30 People died in droves and the government stood there cheering. Much ado about nothing. Do you know what I say human beings are like in the eyes of the government?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Human beings in Egypt are like dust in a cracked cup. The cup can easily break and the dust will blow away in the wind. We cannot gather it together again and in fact there’s no need to gather it together, because it’s a just a little dust that’s been scattered. Human beings in this country are scattered dust, with no value.

  ‘You know the people who died on the ferry, for many of them they still can’t get death certificates issued, because their official papers went down with them, poor things, a total mess. It’s a crying shame, this country. Even the money they said they would give them, many of them haven’t received any of it. They said they would get 66,000 pounds for a dead person and then there were donations from all over, from the Gulf and from businessmen, which would work out at not less than 50,000 pounds per person. Where’s that money gone? No one knows. And the families, poor things, their children are gone and they can’t even get the money, and the owner of the ferry of course fled abroad as usual.

  ‘Did you know too that twenty-four members of the ferry crew ran off and no one can find a trace of them? They say the owner of the ferry smuggled them off so they don’t tell secrets that would get him in trouble, and so the insurance company will pay the money. Because if those people admitted to what happened, the insurance company wouldn’t pay anything. So many disasters. And I heard a rumour, God alone knows, I don’t much like to say “God alone knows”, but I heard this from people and I don’t know where the truth is and where the untruth.’

  ‘What did you hear?’ I asked.

  ‘That the ferry was carrying 500 passengers extra beyond its capacity, but no one wants to say it. Of course the people who fled know all these things,’ he said.

  ‘Where did you get this information from?’ I asked.

  ‘One of the guys in my hometown lost his son, poor guy, in this accident. His son was a construction worker in Saudi Arabia and the father’s at his wit’s end between Safaga and here, and he told us what happened in Safaga. It was chaotic and brutal and heartbreaking. No one gets his rights in this country.

  ‘In the end the guy didn’t get anywhere, and he keeps cursing the government and the ferry owner, and the whole world.

  ‘And just consider the people who died on the ferry; the toiling workers who go to Saudi Arabia to be abused and have to sweat blood to make a pittance. The plane’s too expensive for them so they think they’ll save money by taking the ferry. Just a few wretched workers, in other words, because these days disasters happen only to the poor. They pick them off one by one, and our turn will come in the end. And after all that, you want me to go to the hospital of my own free will?’

  Forty-six

  ‘Have you heard the story about the Ittihad football players?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Which Ittihad?’

  ‘The Alexandria Ittihad, of course. Is there any other one?’ he said.

  ‘Ittihad was travelling to play a match in some African championship and at the airport they discovered that one of the players had a forged passport so they arrested him. The rest of the team left on the plane. Now I’ve been listening to the news for forty years and I’ve never heard of a player forging a whole passport! A visa or a stamp maybe, but a whole passport, that’s just amazing.

  ‘And a few days ago there was the story of that singer Tamer Hosni who forged his military service certificate to get a passport issued, and straight after that other singer Haitham31 also forged an army certificate so he could leave the country. They actually got their passports with the forged certificates, but Tamer has a bigger problem.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because they discovered in his papers that he’d forged a university certificate as well. The guy looks like a professional – and the trouble is that he’s a big star and his films are a big hit. Did you ever hear that singers like Mohamed Fawzi or Abdel Halim forged passports? And the guy who’s going to defend them? The guy who was in charge of Zamalek Club!

  ‘Then there’s that singer Shereen who forged her identity card to say she was unmarried when she was in fact divorced32, and lots of other cases. Forgery in Egypt is now as common as drinking tea, and there’s even more that doesn’t come to light. I had one passenger tell me that many actresses change their date of birth on official papers so when they marry Gulf Arabs or Saudis they’ll take them for spring chickens. That’s one way forgery can earn you riyals straight away, in other words legal prostitution with registered contracts. Do you know where the problem originated?

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘The problem started when everyone with two pennies to his name thought he could do anything with his money. Respect for the state is gone. With money I can rub the government’s nose in the dirt. I can forge a passport, change the entries on an identity card, anything. If my driving licence is confiscated, with money I can have it delivered to my house immediately.

  ‘Everything’s spread out on the pavement and offered for sale. Whenever someone gets in trouble you find he’s fled abroad. How? With money. This month Mamdouh Ismail fled the country, Ihab Talaat33 fled, and others. No need to talk about the months before that, or before that.

  ‘And then they go teach the kids in school that values are more important than money and they make them memorise poems about principles, and that money comes and goes but morals are the pillars of a nation and the basis of humanity. Talk that goes in one ear and comes out the other. Don’t they see what’s going on around them?

  ‘My daughter’s still young, sixteen years old, and in our day that was the age for love and romance, and we used to listen to Umm Kalthoum. But the bitch tells me “What’s that crap about love? I want to marry someone rich. It doesn’t matter whether I love him or not. What matters is that he’s rich.” I tell her there’s nothing more wonderful than love in this world. It’s love that keeps us alive, it’s the air we breathe and what makes me put up with your mother. She tells me: “In this world there’s nothing more wonderful than money.”’

  Forty-seven

  When I got into the taxi I was surprised to find the man sitting in front of me next to the driver was silently weeping. He was a brown-skinned giant with a bushy moustache. The calm was as thick as his moustache, and the night was in its last hours. The only sound was the intermittent and irregular breathing of the giant as he wept.

  In our society it is rare to see a man crying. To see a giant from southern Egypt crying is something you could put in the Guinness Book of World Records.

  The silence continued for some time, then the two men resumed their conversation, conveying to me a state of tension, the vibes between them highly charged.

  The voice of the giant was breaking, and the driver’s voice was full of grief. The whole conversation between them was doleful. The story gradually began to come together in my mind like the pieces of a puzzle, and the full picture did not take shape until I had arrived home.

  The giant was a taxi driver from Alexandria who had come that day to see his brother, also a driver, to borrow some money. But you can’t squeeze blood from a stone, as his fatalistic brother kept telling him.

  The giant had had three operations on his spine in recent years after a long history of driving taxis, and the last operation was four months ago. His doctor had told him not to drive or else it would have unfortunate consequences for his spine. In the last four months the giant had sold everything he possessed and borrowed from ever
yone around him to get out of hospital and start a long course of physiotherapy. He explained in detail his unbearable backache but his dignity did not allow him to cry out in pain, especially in front of his wife and children. When all means of subsistence had dried up, his wife had had to work as a servant for a retired bellydancer more miserly than Père Grandet in Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet, after he had sworn by everything holy that she could not work as long as he was alive.

  Today he had to cover a cheque for 1,000 pounds that he had borrowed before the operation and if he did not pay it back then prison doors loomed, and who else in the world could he resort to other than his brother?

  His brother had had the same operation some time back but at least he was still working as a driver. The problem was that the ghoul, the griffin and the trustworthy friend were easier for him to find than the sum of 1,000 pounds. He had just started paying the instalments on a fridge, the down-payment of which had devoured the advance he had been saving to renew his taxi driver’s licence – and even if he sold his wife he could not come up with this amount.

  It was a calm conversation between two brothers and it seemed to me that affection and bankruptcy had brought them closer. It was a conversation so tragic it was melodramatic, almost to the level of a Bollywood saga, and as I watched, all that was missing were Indian songs and dancing. A tearjerker from the famous Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan would not have been out of place.

  Throughout the conversation they were not aware of my presence, as though I did not exist or perhaps was wearing a cloak that made me invisible. Even when I got out and paid the fare, neither of them paid me any attention or addressed a word to me.

  The two were praying, each whispering to the other, both turning their faces to the heavens on the chance that a portal would open there and their prayers would reach the One who Listens and Answers.