Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Our Algerian foray ended in Ghardaya, an enchanting white and blue-walled Saharan oasis town where we slept on the mud roof of a restaurant. Ghardaya was so well hidden in the cleft of a dried-up river valley that you could almost miss it from above, but down at street level it was a labyrinth of twisting passageways and sandy backstreets. Like most of Algeria away from the Mediterranean cities, it was also very conservative. I came across a notice at the entrance to the kasbah: ‘Gentlemen, please respect our customs,’ it began reasonably enough, ‘and do not go without shirt as it will drive the women into great excitement.’ Really? I was curious to witness the frenzied women of Ghardaya, but thought better of it. For female tourists there were stricter warnings still, and even our casually dressed lycée girls grudgingly draped a shawl over their tanned and bare shoulders.

  I missed my chance to see more of Algeria under peaceful conditions after that. In the early 1990s the military-backed government held elections across the country, which it fully expected to win. But instead the popular vote went to the Islamist party, FIS (Front Islamique de Salvation). The government, however, decided it quite liked being in power and was not going to step down and let the Islamists take over, so it cancelled the elections. There was barely a murmur of protest from the West about this brazen overturning of a democratic election result, because nobody fancied the idea of a strict Islamic government in Algiers. The country then sank into the abyss of a decade-long civil war that claimed an estimated 150,000 lives, possibly more. Most of Algeria became off-limits for Western travellers throughout the 1990s, and as recently as 2003 a group of European tourists was held hostage in the Sahara by an Algerian terrorist group vaguely linked to Al-Qaeda. Reportedly, they only escaped with their lives because a hefty ransom was paid through Libyan intermediaries. Algeria is now slowly creeping back on to the tourist map – Country Life has even run a feature on the well-tended gardens of Algiers – but the civil war has left such a legacy of bitterness that it will take at least a generation for society there to heal. I was lucky: my formative year in the Arab world was to be in a place far removed from such troubles, amongst a people so good-natured it often seemed as if the whole country was sharing one huge collective joke.

  3

  Living in Cairo

  BACK ON THE Arabic course at Exeter, We were busy immersing ourselves in the finer points of Arabic grammar and Islamic history, when over in Cairo the class above us were given a nasty shock. Every year in October the Egyptian military celebrates what it calls its ‘victory’ over Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Although it was indeed a psychological victory for the Arabs when they attacked Israel by surprise, the war resulted in their military defeat. Israel ended up in control of the entire (Egyptian) Sinai Peninsula, the (Palestinian) West Bank and the (Syrian) Golan Heights, so it has always rather baffled me as to how that can be called a victory. But by the late 1970s Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat had decided there was no point being enemies with Israel, a country that after all possessed nuclear weapons, and that they might as well sign a peace deal and live side-by-side as good neighbours. In the eyes of the Arab world Sadat then committed treason by flying to Israel and addressing the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. On the White House lawn the Camp David treaty was sealed between Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachim Begin before a beaming US President Jimmy Carter and the world’s press. But back in Egypt there were some who had already made up their minds that their president must now pay the ultimate price for befriending the Zionist enemy, Israel.

  On 6 October 1981, President Sadat sat in a raised reviewing stand on the outskirts of Cairo, surrounded by his top generals, various ambassadors and assembled defence attachés. He watched with pride as his fighter jets roared overhead in formation and tanks clattered past with commanders saluting him from the turrets. When a column of infantry went past in open trucks, Sadat saw one of the soldiers jump down and he assumed he was going to make an overenthusiastic salute. Sadat even stood up to receive it, but the soldier had other ideas. His name was Khaled El-Islambouly and he was part of an Islamist cell bent on assassinating Sadat and turning Egypt into an Islamic republic. (Iran’s ayatollahs so applauded this idea they named a street after Islambouly in Tehran, close to the British Embassy.)

  Islambouly jumped to the ground with his loaded Kalashnikov already at the aim and let rip a burst of machine-gun fire into the centre of the reviewing stand. His accomplices also opened fire and hurled grenades, one of which landed next to the vice-president, Air Force General Hosni Mubarak, but failed to go off. There was pandemonium in the reviewing stands as people tried to flee the carnage, scrambling over upturned chairs and bullet-riddled bodies. Some of Sadat’s bodyguards began firing wildly, others hid for their own safety. Amidst all this, the president lay mortally wounded; he was dead before the day was out. There was panic in Washington – was Egypt poised to go the same way as Iran and become a West-hating Islamic theocracy? And there was concern in Exeter for the students who had been sent out to study in this apparently unstable country. Should the course be stopped and the students repatriated?

  In fact there was a surprisingly smooth transition of power to Hosni Mubarak, who was seen at the time as a bland and unexciting choice after the flamboyance of Sadat. Some speculated that he did not have the political nous to stay in power for long and predicted he would be ousted within five years. But by the time I interviewed Mubarak in 2001 he had held down the top job for twenty years and was showing no sign of slowing down – or giving up power. The Exeter Arabic course continued to send its students abroad to Egypt, and on a warm evening in September 1982 our class converged at Heathrow for our bargain-basement flight to Cairo.

  My father came to see me off. If he had any misgivings about letting his only child go off to live in the Middle East for a year he hid them well. My parents both knew that going to live in Cairo was something I was passionately keen about and they had given me every encouragement. But that summer my approaching departure had cast a shadow over an otherwise perfect walking holiday we spent in Provence. As the Kenya Airlines Boeing 707 roared down the runway we were all immersed in our own thoughts about the year ahead, except perhaps for Peregrine, who was concentrating on guzzling a large bunch of white grapes on take-off.

  Some time after midnight we landed at Cairo airport. Even before the doors opened we could see there was so much dust in the atmosphere that the lights of the terminal building were giving off a mournful yellow glow. I recognized the building, which I had passed through in transit two years previously; on that occasion I had foolishly downed a glass of airport tap water, then spent the rest of the flight to Manila commuting from my seat to the loo and back.

  As soon as the aircraft hatch swung open and we descended on to the tarmac a strange new smell greeted us. It was a subtle blend of car fumes, overripe fruit, dust, heat and just a hint of sewage, and I will never forget it. It did not strike me as unpleasant; in fact if anything it spelled adventure.

  Once inside the tomb-like terminal building, processing our passports took an age. They would be examined in minute detail – and sometimes upside-down – by a succession of police officers in ill-fitting white tunics held together by black leather belts and cross-straps. Ensconced inside their tiny glass booths, chain-smoking cheap Kilopatra [sic] cigarettes and muttering gravely to each other, they would look up occasionally at us, as if to check we hadn’t run away. Tired to the point of being silly, we made up imaginary conversations between them. ‘This one is definitely a spy, what do you think, ya Hamdi? Deportation or jail? How about this one, claims she’s a student, I think she’s bluffing. Hey, look, this one looks like Princess Diana.’ Since most of our class were girls there was definitely an element of self-importance here, with senior officers striding on to the scene to give the all-important entry stamp with a flourish.

  Outside in the car park we loaded ourselves into a convoy of orange taxis and drove through the empty streets of Heliopolis, a Cairo su
burb, with the taxi’s cassette blaring ‘Get Down On It’ and the warm night air rushing past. We could hardly believe our eyes: it was now about three o’clock in the morning yet here were whole fifty-strong crews of labourers working through the night to put up new blocks of flats. Skinny men in overflowing turbans carried pails of liquid concrete up rickety ladders; it reminded me of an engraving of the building of the Pyramids. Later we learned that modern Egyptian architecture is not quite what it was at the time of the Pharaohs. In Cairo’s sprawling slums – and even sometimes in upmarket Heliopolis – shoddily built apartment blocks occasionally collapse on top of their tenants. Most often it is a case of a greedy landlord building yet another storey on top of an already shaky edifice, skimping on the reinforced concrete and rewarding a contractor for finishing ahead of schedule. But frequently it is a case of desperation; Cairo is one of the most overcrowded cities on earth and living space is at a premium.

  In Egypt, we learned, it is all too common for a newly married couple to have to wait years before they can afford to live in a flat of their own. In the meantime they move in with the in-laws, sharing a cramped apartment with Magdi the father-in-law, Zubaida his oversized wife, Ahmed the school-age son and Salwa and Nashwa, the two unmarried daughters now in their twenties. Once the excitement of the wedding is over family nerves can soon fray. Hamdi and his new wife are painfully aware of the pressure on them to start a family, yet they struggle to find the privacy to get the job done. Before long there is talk of building a vertical extension to accommodate the new couple, and so on. Once, after we had been living in Cairo for a few months, we were sitting in a café in the poor quarter of Imbaba when I noticed clouds of dust falling inexplicably from the ceiling. The next thing I knew there was a hoof protruding through a hole, then another one, and suddenly half the ceiling gave way and a sheep fell through the roof and on to the floor of the café. Amazingly, it was unhurt. It picked itself up, shook its fleece a couple of times, nodded as if to say ‘beat that’ and wandered off into the street. Café conversation paused for about five seconds to take this in, then resumed as if nothing had happened. Cairo.

  The apartment that the university first put us up in was a shambles. It was only half finished, there were no sinks, and workmen wandered in and out with pharaonic-looking tools giving everyone very little privacy. It was all very different from the cool white lines and cleanliness of Tunisia, which Peregrine and I had travelled around that spring. We were soon introduced to the joys of the Egyptian lavatory. From a distance it looked familiar, but lift up the lid and you were confronted by a curious metal spout poking towards you. This, we learned, was meant to be turned on or off with a tap beside the cistern, the idea being to clean your backside with the help of your left hand. (In Arab society the left hand is traditionally considered ‘unclean’ for this reason, hence the offence given by Westerners who touch food with it, and the punishment meted out to thieves in Saudi Arabia and Iran of lopping off the right hand so the amputee can no longer feed from the communal platter.) The Egyptian lavatorial spouts had an obvious design flaw: one look at them betrayed the pieces of excrement lodged in there. Left in, these formed a hard pellet. When one of the Couch People turned on the tap thinking it was the flush, the pellet shot out and hit her in the chest. She took it quite well, as I remember.

  Outside on the street, Cairo was still sizzling in the late-summer heat. We walked past fruit stalls where the owners had carefully and artistically stacked their colourful produce into little pyramids beneath tattered canvas awnings. Here were fruits none of us had ever tried before: mangos, guavas and pomegranates (this was the early eighties, remember). We had been warned that since watermelons were sold by weight, stall owners sometimes dipped them in Nile water to make them heavier, but nothing could keep us away from the delicious juice drinks and milkshakes on sale at every street corner. We were in Zamalek, the embassy quarter, and down almost every street stood whitewashed embassies guarded by truckfuls of soldiers with helmets, Kalashnikovs and fixed bayonets. They were from the Amn Al-Markazi, ‘Central Security’, and although at first they looked forbidding we soon learned they were mostly illiterate country farmers’ boys serving out their lowly paid conscription. One soldier outside the Chinese embassy used to sing to himself in a high-pitched voice, and once we saw another one crawling on hands and knees at night to steal a mango from a grocery stall. A couple of years later it all turned nasty when thousands of these Central Security troops rioted over poor pay. They set fire to hotels and various belly-dancing clubs along the Giza road and had to be quelled by the regular army in what was the first major challenge to President Mubarak’s rule.

  Zamalek is part of an island that forces the Nile to divide briefly as it flows serenely through Cairo on its way to the Mediterranean. One morning Peregrine and I took a tiny rowing-boat taxi across the river to the neighbouring quarter of Imbaba. We were suddenly in a different world. Skeins of sand blew across the street and built up on the ragged pavement in drifts; a bent set of traffic lights shone red, amber and green all at the same time for a whole minute, then went blank. The traffic ignored them anyway and hurtled along the Nile road regardless. Men came out of their doorways dressed in pyjamas and slippers and argued melodramatically with their neighbours, then promptly hugged each other. Rotund women swathed completely in black milaya gowns squatted beside baskets of red dates. A small flock of sheep with fat, uncut tails dozed on the pavement, while one of them wandered over to a café and dumped a load of dung in the doorway. A weary donkey stood ankle-deep in its own filth, and a child wearing nothing but a grubby T-shirt urinated beside a pile of guavas for sale. A boy in a pair of oversized trousers held up with string came running past us, wheeling a hubcap like a hoop, bouncing it through stinking puddles and over crushed tin cans. Looking up at us he lost his concentration and fell amidst the rubbish, but he did not cry, he just stood up, brushed off the pieces of rotting vegetables that had stuck to him, and ran on. Round a corner we came across a seemingly untended herd of thin white camels that picked and nibbled their way over a pile of rubble. Despite the squalor, this was a far more authentic Cairo than the one we were temporarily lodging in and we longed to explore it further. Over the coming months we went there often, getting to know some of the regulars in the cafés, exercising our new-found Arabic and losing badly at dominoes and backgammon. Years later, during the violent Islamist insurgency of the mid-nineties, I was saddened to hear that Imbaba had become a no-go zone for Westerners, a place where the police fought running gun battles with Islamists trying to topple the secular government of Husni Mubarak.

  But now, fresh off the plane from London, we were told we still had a few more days of liberty before the start of the academic course. Why not escape the last of the summer heat and take the train up to Alexandria, Egypt’s second city? suggested the Egyptian teachers. Unfortunately, half the city seemed to have had the same idea and as the train pulled slowly out of Cairo’s Ramses station it was a shock to see hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men clinging to the sides of trains and clustering together on the roof. But Egyptian trains move at such a sedate pace that we decided it would probably be hard to fall off, and even if you did you could probably pick yourself up and catch up with the train again. Inside our second-class compartment we met Marwan, a burly Special Forces captain going home on leave. On his combat fatigues he wore a little gold octopus – ‘for scuba dive’, he told us – and a pair of parachute jump wings. Another badge said ‘Ranger’. He had trained with the Americans, he said, at Fort Bragg in Carolina, and for the entire journey he kept us entertained with stories of how tough his training had been. ‘What an interesting guy,’ we all said as we parted company at Alexandria station. We thought we were saying goodbye, but Marwan had other ideas. Every day that week he would come round to the rented flat we had found; day or night, it didn’t matter to him, he seemed to have unlimited time on his hands. It was our first encounter with the sometimes suffocating embrace
of Egyptian hospitality and we were forced to develop elaborate ruses to shake him off. ‘Just off for a haircut,’ one of us would lie. ‘OK, my friend, I come with you,’ Marwan would reply. ‘Er, we’re really too tired to come out.’ ‘No problem, I come sit with you.’

  But despite Marwan’s over-eager attempts at friendship, I liked Egyptians immediately. They have a tremendous sense of humour, a winning way with words, and an ability to see the funny side of themselves and their situation that is sorely lacking in much of the rest of the Arab world. Every day I would learn new phrases, picked up in conversation or overheard at a bus stop. ‘Haasib walla’larabiyaat ha taklak!’ I once heard a mother shout to her young son as they were crossing the road. ‘Be careful or else the cars will eat you up!’ Perhaps it is because Egypt is the Bollywood of Arab cinema that I found people were prone to melodrama, with arguments quickly escalating into harmless shouting matches. One of the greatest insults was to be called ‘gazma!’, a shoe. Only one thing could top that and that was to be called ‘sitteen gazma!’, ‘sixty shoes!’