It tells of the young girl becoming a well-read young woman, sitting right now in her pink pyjamas on a bed scattered with soft toys from a different era.
A study desk sits in the corner, the only space that speaks of today.
I will always be grateful to my parents for giving me this space.
The noise from outside my bedroom door is beginning to bear down on my unexpected good mood.
Slowly, I open the door and peer out. It was always crucial to exit at the right time. I open the door just as my brother comes rushing towards me. He is whining. I straighten my back and march past him. My mother is behind him, her hair almost wild, one shoe on with her arms slightly raised. There is power in the arm raise, like she is about to cast a spell on the whole house. She looks insane. I walk straight past her too. I can feel her watching me.
In the kitchen I slowly pour a glass of milk, the noise now on the other side of the apartment, giving me a precious few more minutes peace. I stop to listen for a few seconds.
Suddenly I hear them coming back towards me. I sit down at the breakfast table and drink my milk. My mother barges in. ‘Sophia, he lost his gym shoes and he says if he can’t do gym class he won’t go to school.’
No hello, no good morning.
‘Where did he lose them?’ I ask calmly.
‘I don’t know, that’s why they are lost,’ my mother retaliates.
I give her a look, one she knows well. ‘Careful’ it says, ‘don’t snap so early, you know what happens when you do that.’
My mother takes a calming breath. ‘OK, sorry,’ she says through her exhale.
I smile, indicating for her to go on.
‘He said he left them outside the front door last time. They are not there, we have looked everywhere.’
‘Saleeem!’ I call out.
He comes huffing into the kitchen. ‘Did you look under your bed?’ I ask.
‘Yessss,’ he says with irritation in his voice.
‘Don’t be rude,’ I say. ‘If you want my help be nice.’
He lowers his eyes to the floor, shoulders dropping.
‘Go and look in your room behind the door where you probably left them last time. I knew there was a funny smell coming from there.’
He goes and looks, coming back with his gym shoes in his hand. My mother gasps in horror. ‘If you knew why the hell didn’t you just tell me?’ she snaps.
I laugh. It amuses me that after tolerating my brother’s tantrum all morning she snaps at me five minutes after I have gotten up.
She barks at Salem to follow her to the car and they march to the door. She turns back and looks around the kitchen. I lean into the fruit bowl and hand her the car keys. She stares at the car keys with disgust and seems to consider walking to school as a way to retain some dignity. Snatching the keys, she marches away again. Just before she leaves my vision, she turns to me. ‘There is some French toast in the oven for you,’ she says.
‘Thanks, mama!’ I say, smiling.
And the rest of the day is mine. My timetable this semester gives me Thursday off. Everyone says I struck gold because I have a three day weekend. But actually, Thursday is my reading day. It’s the day I hang out at home, in silence. I often spend the morning catching up on emails, social media etc. I usually have an early lunch, made without a sound in the kitchen, and spend the rest of the afternoon working on assignments and reading.
I take my French toast to the bedroom and throw myself on my bed, my door left wide open. I lie there for a while chewing on the toast, wondering what if I choked and was found by my mother nine hours later, mouth open, a bit of French toast she made with love lodged in my windpipe. And then I stop telling myself stories.
Looking over at my laptop, I decide to read and grab a book from under my bed. The slow internet can wait. Puffing myself up to a more comfortable position, I place the plate next to me and open the book.
I stayed like that for over an hour. Leisurely reading. One of the great things about literature is that you have to read fiction for your studies, giving you the perfect excuse every time. ‘Why are you reading romantic nonsense Sophia?’ ‘It’s for my studies, baba.’ ‘Oh, well … OK carry on.’
At some point I hear a noise coming from the open living area. My father is standing there inspecting the furniture like he has just walked into the wrong house.
‘Baba?’ I ask, confused.
‘Where’s your mother?’ he asks with an urgency that concerns me. I stand up from my leaning position against the wall. ‘She took Salem to school and then went to work,’ I answer. It’s Thursday, he knows this, it happens every day except Friday and Saturday.
He looks at me, taking in my pyjamas and book in hand. He comes over to me, placing his hand on my cheek and says ‘Oh OK, nothing’s wrong. I am popping out and you just stay here. Don’t go out, just stay at home.’ With this he pats my cheek one more time and walks towards the door.
After he leaves I almost run to my laptop to switch it on. Now I am not an idiot. I know my family well enough to know that if nothing was wrong, he would scream at me not to go out if he didn’t want me to. It would be an order, one that my mother might be able to soften later, but an order nonetheless. The fact that he tried to break it to me gently that nothing was wrong means clearly there is something wrong.
Grabbing my laptop and taking it back to the bed, I turn it on. And there it is.
The Day of Rage.
The wording was aggressive. A whole day of rage. Is it uncontrolled rage? Lashing out rage? Or is it suppressed rage? Rage ready to blow? The ambiguity was in some ways a direct threat.
And the date selected could not have been more perfect. Tuesday the 25th of January, the day the nation commemorates its police force, celebrates their duty and honours them. Egyptians from Alexandria to Aswan were planning to take to the streets to protest against that very same force, the thugs of the establishment. It was, in fact, genius.
People had been talking about such a day for a long time. It had been bubbling, but lots of things had been bubbling. Knowing which had bubbled over and which had simmered down was not easy. We had heard students were organising themselves, teachers, nurses and the average man, woman and child on the street, but no one actually displayed any rage to my knowledge. And now the whole country was going to do just that, bare its teeth, show its rage, fight not flee on January 25th. Five days from now.
VI
A self-education
I have often looked back and wondered if I really was that uninformed. I knew most of the facts already, but felt totally detached from the sentiment. Was I really so ambivalent to the world around me and so out of touch with the feeling rising on the streets? How could I have gone about my daily life so detached from everyone else’s?
Watching the revolution unfold on your television screen from a distant place it is easy to think everyone in Cairo was there, that not a household didn’t take to the streets. It’s true, we were all part of it in some way. But for many people life continued as normal. There were disruptions to normality, but it is impossible to live a day in Cairo without something being disrupted. It’s impossible to execute a plan to the detail because something unexpected will come along and disrupt it, jumble the order of your timeline so you have to do the first thing last and the last thing first. You have to be comfortable with ambiguity to live in Cairo and to live through a revolution.
That is not an excuse for my apathy or ignorance. I was clearly naïve and self-engrossed, despite telling myself I was current and informed. For some reason I made the choice to turn a blind eye. I am not sure why; fear, blame or perhaps I am being too generous in my assessment of myself to admit I really didn’t care all that much. But I did care, I do care.
It was that morning, sitting at my laptop, when I realised all the little signs warning me something was wrong amounted to something very real. Something I could no longer obscure my vision of with an outstretched hand as I often did in taxis on se
eing a street child inhaling from a brown paper bag. I felt superficial and shallow. I felt I had lied to myself for so long. I had built a defensive wall around me, made up of those lies, and finally admitting the truth did not guarantee an escape. So I did the only thing I know how to do. I read. I read for what seemed like hours; a self-education that was probably already too late.
A few hours later I heard the key in the front door. Returning to my previous position against the wall I watched my family come in. My brother with his shoulders dropped, collected from school before gym class, my father shepherding them inside and double locking the door as though expecting the demonstrators to camp in our living room. And my mother looking flustered, but still in control.
‘You’re still in your pyjamas Sophia?’ she asks, more shocked at my appearance than being collected from work by my father like a school kid.
‘What’s going on outside?’ I ask, indicating to the living room bay windows. The world out there feeling so far away from the world in here.
‘Nothing unusual,’ my mother replies. ‘What would be going on outside except the usual chaos?’ she continues, the dig at my father obvious to everyone.
‘Can I go out?’ I ask no one in particular.
‘No!’ my father snaps almost before I’ve finished the question.
I approach the subject from a different angle. ‘Why are you all home early?’
‘Your father insisted we come home. I am not sure what we are supposed to do for the rest of the day stuck in here. I had to cancel my afternoon appointments,’ my mother rattles on, the question giving her the perfect platform to express her discontent.
‘What do you want me to do?’ my father asks her. ‘Shall I not worry about my family, not try to protect them? Shall I let them run around the city when the city is about to be turned on its head?’
‘Of course you should darling,’ she says soothingly, ‘but look around you, this city is already on its head, it was born on its head. Look outside, everything is the same. People are still going about their normal business. Why should we lock ourselves in our home like we have something to fear when everyone else is just carrying on. It is not us who should be scared.’
‘I am not scared for myself, Fatima,’ my father replies, feeling the dent in his masculinity. ‘I fear for my children, for you. We have to be careful. They say people are coming into Cairo from the countryside by the truckload. Do you know what those fellaheen are like? They are feral, undomesticated.’
My mother smiles at this self-hatred, but says nothing. My father was born in the countryside.
‘I read the protesters come from all walks of life,’ I say, refusing to drop the subject. ‘They are not hooligans from the country, though some of them might be. The internet says people from different backgrounds are expected to attend; families, school children, young, old, teachers, doctors …’ I trail off.
‘Who is this Internet that it speaks? Is it a person?’ my father asks, clearly irritated now. ‘I don’t care what the Internet or anyone else says. Until we know exactly what is happening we stay at home. Until I know it is safe I don’t want you,’ pointing his long surgical finger at me, ‘in a taxi or at a mall or anywhere near university.’ I see from the corner of my eye my brother follow my father’s index finger to my face and wonder what he is thinking. Sometimes his silence unnerves me.
‘I’m going out. Lock the door behind me,’ my father announces.
I try to understand my parents as much as possible. That might sound strange to you because teenagers are not supposed to understand their parents. But, a combination of a culture that never lets you forget what your parents do for you and parents who are, at most times, very reasonable and accommodating, makes adolescence difficult. It is difficult to throw an adolescent tantrum or hate your parents when they, unlike so many others, try to make life pleasant, try to carve out a space for you that is your own.
But, at that moment it felt like a harem had been instituted and my mother and I were its first unwilling subjects. My father had acted like a hypocrite, though I couldn’t bring myself to call him one. To order us to stay indoors, as he made his way to the exit, was hypocritical. I returned to my bedroom, closing that door behind me. I fumed on my bed, not interested in reading about the Day of Rage. I was currently experiencing my own day of rage and wanted to wallow in it for as long as possible, to know what it felt like to hold onto anger and drag it out … instead of denial.
Eventually, my mother dragged me out of my pit of hate and forced me to help her with lunch. We ate, the three of us quietly, my brother engrossed in his own thoughts and my mother and I maintaining an unspoken agreement to live through this Thursday as though it was no different. The front door remained closed, double locked.
I paced a lot on that Thursday. I remember clearly pacing. I must have walked a marathon in my own home. The pacing was aimless. I would walk to the kitchen not needing anything in particular or go into the bathroom simply to stare at my face in the mirror. At one point I walked to the front door, unlocked it and stared out at the communal corridor. My mother watched me standing there, warning me with her eyes not to break the rules, not to jeopardise the tranquillity. I closed the door and locked it again.
Early that evening my father returned. We ate dinner at the table. My brother hadn’t even bothered with his cap tonight. He left it on his bed, knowing ritual banter could easily escalate into something more destructive. He was smart for his age.
As the table was cleared away and we all settled into the living room to watch television, the government news tonight rather than the regular soap opera, I detected a change in my father’s demeanour. He now seemed almost apologetic. It wasn’t anything he said, but he spoke in a softer voice when he did speak, made subtle attempts at small talk. We entertained his new mood, allowed him to slowly come out of his hard shell and emerge a softer man. My mother led the way in this, knowing her husband well. I followed reluctantly. My brother ignored it all.
The news gave no hint of what was developing on the streets and in the cafes both virtual and real. You would think the world was ticking along, spinning on its axis no faster or slower than usual. ‘They control the media,’ my father said, answering a question no one had asked. It was the first time any of us had broached the subject and his statement indicated we could begin to talk about it.
There is something very bizarre about watching the news when it is in complete contradiction to what you know. Instead of taking it as a factual story you start listening to the underlying narrative, watching for hidden threats. Watching a story about a building that has collapsed in an old neigh-bourhood and how the emergency services responded with efficiency and professionalism when you know outside your door a mass of people are mobilising themselves, collecting the scattered bricks from that building to throw at those same service personnel, leaves you feeling like you are in political purgatory, neither part of the mass group of people nor part of a passive audience.
The news becomes just one big lie of omission. I felt like I too was living a lie of omission. That I was faced with the option of teasing those omitted details out into the open, or pushing them back down, beneath the ground I walk on.
I decided to tease them out of my father. So began a long dragged out conversation to come to the issue. Getting straight to the point is not much appreciated in Arab culture. So I began with asking him what the weather was like. It was an important question because it was my first reference to the outside world that entire evening. He just nodded. ‘The usual,’ he said. So I continued. ‘Where did you go? … Who did you see?’ Until eventually my father looked up. ‘People are talking about it but every one is usual … normal. Everyone is happy, smiling he said, addressing the issue directly.’
We all relaxed a little at that moment. Partly because the news was reassuring, but also because my father too relaxed. He no longer had to carry the weight of thinking in detail about ensuring his family’s safety.
We all smiled. We were going to see Uncle Ali in Zamalek.
VII
A family reconnaissance
The following morning, after a leisurely breakfast, we all showered, dressed and got into the family car. The next hour was total chaos. The noise of the traffic was insane. A consistent beep. There was just a persistent hum with sudden bangs to the side for the entire journey. Sometimes it was my mother beeping or my father stretching his hand from the passenger seat to partake in the conversation.
The car horn in Cairo is not used only to alert people to danger. It is a language. The beep can mean: go; stop; come; hello; goodbye; watch-out; you donkey; amongst other things. It is a vocabulary and therefore a permanent presence on any car journey in Cairo.
By the time we all got to my uncle’s we were frazzled. The airconditioning in the car meant we still looked decent. Make-up still in place, no sweat patches on the back. But, we did have to compose ourselves before stepping into their block.
Uncle Ali is so different to my father. Though brothers, their personalities are wide apart. They are both doctors and in that respect have a lot in common. But, if my father gets a joke, my uncle looks puzzled; if my uncle takes offence, my father is the last to notice. They do both have moustaches though.
Regardless, everyone is happy to see each other and there are hugs and kisses at the door. By getting there early we can spend the entire day with them, leaving just after dinner. A long dragged out visit with time for a host of conversations.
It makes me laugh how my father always calls the household Uncle Ali’s. It is also Aunt Nora’s.
As soon as the hellos and kissing are done my mother and father switch what we usually hear them call each other. They go from ‘your mother’, ‘your father’ to ‘your brother’, ‘your sister’.
Eighteen Days of Spring in Winter Page 3
