‘I’m here for features, not news but don’t tell me if you don’t want to. I know sharing stories isn’t your long suit.’
He lowered his voice. ‘You know the Muslim Brotherhood meeting that everyone’s talking about?’
‘Yes?’
‘I know where it is.’
Jean smiled. ‘Of course you do.’ She put her hand on his and Carver felt a jolt – old, almost forgotten electricity. ‘I’ll bring my medicine cabinet down later. We’ll sort out those aches and pains of yours and talk some more, yeah?’
‘I’d like that.’
Zahra was on reception, checking in the new guests. The place was – to use Patrick’s word – buzzy and every arrival and departure was being carefully observed. As he made his way across the hotel lobby, Carver was aware of being watched. He slowed his pace and tried to appear less purposeful. A pair of winged sphinx statues stood sentry at the entrance to the hotel, one either side of the sliding glass doors, and leaning casually against one of the statues, chatting to Patrick, was Security Steve – all six feet four of him.
‘Bollocks.’
Carver noticed Patrick shift position, placing himself between William and the giant who was wearing a safari jacket, camouflage trousers and boots.
‘Hi there, William, you remember Steve?’
‘Yep.’
Security Steve was the former Special Forces man who the BBC had hired to look after team safety. Carver and Patrick had come across him in Tunisia and he and William had taken an instant dislike to each other. Usually Carver got on well with the former army blokes who did this sort of work but he didn’t like Steve. As far as Patrick could work out, William’s main objection was his age.
‘It’s usually the older blokes do the security thing – late forties and fifty-year-olds. He’s in his twenties, early thirties tops. Why’s he doing this job?’
Patrick had suggested that Steve might have been discharged on health grounds or something similar but Carver wasn’t buying.
‘Bollocks. Look at him; he’s as fit as a butcher’s dog. It doesn’t add up.’
Patrick exchanged pleasantries while Carver skulked around making his impatience obvious. After a couple of minutes, Steve picked up a clipboard, which looked small and slightly ridiculous in his huge hands.
‘So, if you two are heading into Tahrir you’ll need to take the flak jackets.’ He had a Bristol accent that hardened slightly when he was issuing instructions. He turned to Carver: ‘And for you, old-timer, it’ll be the respirator, or at the very least your inhaler.’ A history of asthma meant that William was entitled, encouraged in fact, to take the respirator if he was going anywhere near tear gas. It was an unwieldy device that he and Patrick had taken out once in Tunis and ended up sending back to the hotel in a taxi.
‘I don’t want the bloody respirator. And I’ve got my inhaler.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘We’re not going to Tahrir anyway.’
‘I see. Where are you going?’
The sliding doors were open, with a few people smoking nearby. Carver had the feeling that other ears were tuned to their conversation and he had no intention of telling Steve anyway.
‘Mind your own business.’
The only taxi waiting on the rank was a black and white Lada with dents down the side and at least one hubcap missing. The driver’s seat was empty but as they drew closer Carver saw there was a man lying across the back seat of the car, an open newspaper across his face, apparently asleep. He rapped on the rear window and the man pulled the paper from his face and squinted up at him. Sitting up in the seat, he wound down the window and nodded at Carver who leaned in and lowered his voice to little more than a whisper.
‘The Mosque of the Servants of the Compassionate, El Hossein Square?’
‘I know this place.’ He pulled a notebook from his trouser pocket and made a great show of flicking through it. ‘It is two hundred dollars.’
‘What? Bollocks to that. That’s more than you get paid in a month.’
The man shrugged and began winding the car window back up.
Carver jabbed his finger at the man. ‘Give me a minute.’
The cabbie shrugged, lay down and pulled the newspaper back across his face. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Carver turned to Patrick. ‘Go fetch Zahra. The receptionist with the long dark hair?’
Patrick returned moments later with Zahra at his side. She didn’t bother tapping on the window but instead simply wrenched the back door of the cab open and started interrogating the taxi driver in a noisy Arabic. The man argued back, but not for long; soon his head dropped and Zahra turned to the two journalists.
‘He says there is a new rate for the taxis now. During the national emergency he is calling it.’
The man nodded and took his notebook out to show them the new rates.
Zahra dismissed him with a wave. ‘It is nonsense. But the American and the Japanese television people paid him four hundred dollars for a day of driving and now he and his friends think they can charge anything.’ She turned to the man and spoke again, more softly now.
The cabbie stared at Zahra and glanced briefly at Carver before getting out and walking round to the other side of his car and opening the passenger door.
‘What’s going on?’
‘He has changed his mind. He understands how important your work is. He will charge you what it says on the meter.’
Carver laughed. ‘Really? I’ve never seen a Cairo cabbie use the meter. What did you say to the man?’
Zahra lowered her voice. ‘I told him about the work you are doing and then I asked him where his shame was.’
The old Lada started on the second turn of the key and the driver slipped it into first gear and crawled down the hotel drive towards the security barrier. A tired-looking guard in khaki uniform waved them through. The footwell on the passenger side was littered with old newspapers, sweet wrappers and cigarette packets; Carver cleared a space with his foot and put his plastic bag down while Patrick arranged his long limbs in the cramped back seat.
After a few hundred yards the taxi stopped at a red traffic light and Carver saw a small crowd, gathered around a pile of rubbish heaped at the bottom of a lamp post. They were staring at the rubbish with looks of wonder and amazement on their faces, pointing at the pile of black bags. The taxi driver rolled down his window and then they heard it: blaring loudly from a speaker concealed somewhere inside the rubbish, came music.
The cabbie banged his hand on the dashboard and laughed. ‘It is our song, the old song of Egypt.’
It took Carver a moment to make the connection; he knew the old national anthem had been banned by the government, he just didn’t know what the anthem sounded like. He was hearing it now.
Stunts like this, small acts of civil disobedience, had become increasingly common in Cairo. The traffic lights changed colour but the cars did not move; drivers waited and watched and listened to the banned song, and the crowd on the street grew. As Carver and the cabbie watched, a policeman arrived and pushed his way to the front. When all he saw was a pile of black bags he was momentarily confused, then he started digging through the bags looking for the source of the outlawed song. When he finally unearthed the offending item – a bulky silver cassette recorder – he ceremoniously pressed stop before throwing it to the floor and bringing his boot down hard on the tape recorder again and again. The crowd began to boo but when the policeman shot them a warning glare, instead of guilt or fear he saw ridicule. Some of the watching crowd laughed openly at the officer while a group of children mocked him with a stamping dance of their own.
Carver turned in his seat. ‘Did you …’ He saw Patrick, hanging halfway out of the window, microphone in hand.
‘I got all that.’
‘Good.’
‘So where are we going?’
‘I’m going to this Muslim Brotherhood meeting, but I think it’s better if I go alone.’
‘How come?’
<
br /> ‘Less conspicuous and it means you can go on to Tahrir and get people reacting to whatever the Brothers decide.’
It was clear that Patrick didn’t like the plan and Carver sympathised – he wasn’t that keen on it himself.
The taxi came to a halt beside a stretch of high white wall; the driver wrenched the handbrake up and pointed out of the passenger side window. ‘Mosque of Servants of Compassionate. I will wait?’
Carver shook his head. ‘No, take my colleague here on to Tahrir.’
Carver climbed out of the car and nodded at Patrick who watched as William walked across the street, towards the mosque’s main gate, and allowed the crowd to swallow him.
11 Citizen Journalist
DATELINE: The Corniche, Cairo, Egypt, January 27 2011
Nawal strode down the corniche. A growing line of TV crews were setting up live broadcast points, jostling for the spots they thought would provide the best backdrop. She walked up and down the line until she found what she was looking for: a pile of placards hidden under a gantry close to where one of the big American networks was broadcasting. Nawal had received a direct message from a follower in New York early that morning. She got out her phone.
@tsquarelawan
Pro President demonstrations happening @ the corniche where western TV stations are working.
@tsquarelawan
Demonstrating at 0530 in the morning! So they are in the background of US primetime news shows … clever.
@tsquarelawan
We must be clever too! Let at least one hundred people gather @ the corniche tomorrow at 0500!
She gathered the pile of pro-presidential placards together in both arms and dumped them further down the street, burying them underneath a good foot of rubbish and rotting vegetables. Standing back, she caught sight of her reflection in a shop window. Black hoodie under a tatty leather jacket, cropped hair, cargo pants and trainers. She looked tired and about a million miles from pretty. But pretty wasn’t important – not anymore. Nawal’s thoughts turned to Zahra. She wondered whether her friend felt the same? Zahra never looked ugly, she never looked plain. In Nawal’s opinion, Zahra never looked anything other than beautiful. She checked her phone for messages and then set off in the direction of Tahrir Square.
Nawal liked to enter and leave Tahrir using a citizen checkpoint that she’d helped set up close to the Arab League building. The buck-toothed boy who had the job of greeting new arrivals and checking that no one was carrying a weapon had a nice manner. As he nodded Nawal through he grinned and yelled over her head, towards the queue of people waiting patiently to enter Tahrir.
‘Hold your head up high, be proud! You are Egyptian!’
Staring across the square, Nawal was proud. She remembered one of her grandfather’s stories: how the stones of the pyramids were cut so well, so perfect was the fit that you could not slip a knife between one stone and the next. Only the Egyptians were able to do this, he said. As she walked across the square, Nawal felt something similar. She got her phone out and typed a couple of lines, not a finished message but something that they could use later: Here in this square is what we should be, what we once were and could be again.
Carver attracted suspicious looks from the moment he walked inside the mosque’s main gates. He hurried, head down, across the courtyard, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. The space outside the main mosque building was filled with worshippers unable to find room inside. They were busy arranging their prayer mats around an ancient-looking sundial and compass that stood on a tiled dais in the centre of the courtyard. The sundial looked like it had been cast from solid gold, the compass also gold but with an ivory inlay beneath the delicate magnetic metal needle. Most of the worshippers seemed happy to use these old instruments as a guide to where to place their mat and the correct direction of prayer. Not all, however, and Carver was interested to see some of the younger Brothers consulting apps on their phones and shuffling their prayer mats around accordingly.
It took him some time to work his way through the crowd and into the mosque. Once he had, Carver found a shadowy corner and stood, his back against the wall, trying to get the measure of the place. At a long row of deep ceramic sinks, bearded men, young and old, most of them wearing white jellabiya, were washing themselves: hands and forearms, face, neck and ears before slipping off their shoes and entering the prayer room. In the past, in other countries and at other mosques, Carver had been invited to join them, to perform his own ablutions and take part in the act of worship but glancing around he knew there was little chance of any such invitation today. The atmosphere ahead of the Brotherhood’s big political decision was tense and the presence of an overweight westerner, skulking in a corner, wasn’t making anyone feel more relaxed. The stares he received ranged from mild suspicion to outright hostility.
He decided it would be better to move around and look like he was expecting to meet someone here and so he did this for a while, edging past tight groups of men deep in conversation. Carver nodded a respectful greeting at anyone who looked his way and muttered the same Arabic sentence at them all: Hal tatahadath Al Englyzeyah? He knew that many of the men he asked this question did speak some English but none of them wanted to speak it with him – not today anyway.
He poked his head inside the high domed prayer room and took a look. There were a dozen pillars down each side of the carpeted room; it was empty of furniture apart from a platform at the far end where the stoop-shouldered imam was struggling with a microphone stand, attempting to lower it to the correct height. Carver was admiring one of the Koranic verses, painted in beautiful, tall calligraphic script on the honey-coloured stone wall when he felt someone grab his upper arm. A hard hand gripped him and pulled Carver round and away from the room. Carver shook his arm free and stared at his assailant who was a foot shorter than him but stocky. The man wore a white skullcap and dirty-looking dishdasha; he was shaking a fat finger at Carver.
‘This room is not for you, it is forbidden.’
‘I understand.’ Carver moved away from the prayer room in the direction of the front door but the man followed him and blocked his exit.
‘What do you want here? What is it you do?’
Carver buttoned his blazer. ‘I’m a journalist.’
‘You are English?’
‘Yes, I’m English. My name’s Carver.’ He held out his right hand, more in hope than expectation. Sure enough the stocky man ignored Carver’s hand, which was left hanging, marooned in mid-air for a time before he let it drop. The man moved closer and Carver could smell him now: his clothes stank of old sweat, his breath was sour. Carver stepped back towards the wall and as he did, knocked against a rack of shoes, spilling them on to the floor.
‘You are not a journalist. You are a kafir and a spy.’ The man raised his voice as he made this dangerous accusation and it worked; half a dozen other men heard his words and Carver felt a crowd start to gather around him.
He put his plastic bag down on the floor and reached into his blazer pocket for his wallet and, inside that, his press card. He found it and held it out in front of him, willing his hands not to shake.
The skullcapped man glanced at it and laughed, pointing his finger again. ‘It is fake. We have spies outside our house, my brothers, and now we have a spy inside as well. What is to be done?’ The question was aimed at his colleagues but the man spat the words into Carver’s face.
Carver recoiled at the stink of halitosis and the strength of this stranger’s hate. He felt other hands on him now, pushing and plucking at him.
Just then there was movement at the back of the crowd and Carver watched as a rake-thin black man in a dark suit and tie pushed his way to the front, mumbling apologies in Arabic as he did so. Arriving at the front of the angry knot of men he nodded at the thug in the skullcap before taking Carver’s press card from his hand and studying it. He was a tall, fine-featured man – not an Egyptian, Carver thought: East African perhaps?
The m
an sucked at his teeth then spoke, first in competent Arabic and then a fluent, heavily accented English. ‘This card is genuine. This man is no spy, he is a journalist trying to tell people what is happening here in your country.’ He paused and glanced around, judging the effect his words were having on his audience. ‘More than this, he is your guest. He has a right to a welcome. You have a duty to welcome him, your book tells you this.’
Heads nodded, some in agreement, others in resignation. The thug in the skullcap grabbed the press card and looked at it again before tossing it to the floor and turning away in disgust.
Carver’s protector retrieved it and handed it back. He was smiling now. ‘Come, I will take you to see Mr Shalaby, you will be safer in his company.’
‘Er, thank you.’
‘It is nothing. We outsiders must stick together.’
Carver was unsure what to make of this man. His accent intrigued him and he was keen to ask where he was from, but before Carver knew it he was standing in front of Mr Shalaby. His guardian angel made the introduction and stayed long enough to listen to the journalist explain what he was after, before moving away. When Carver next looked, he had gone.
Shalaby was an unassuming-looking middle-aged man with thick, black-framed glasses and a short grey beard. He said he would be willing to give a short interview on the condition that he was referred to simply as a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood. This wasn’t ideal but Carver wasn’t in much of a position to argue. An interview of any sort was better than none and better than any other hack was likely to get. He agreed and took his tape recorder out.
‘There is growing discontent in Egypt, protests like those we’ve seen elsewhere in the Arab world. Many believe these protests will only succeed if the Muslim Brotherhood gives their support. Will you?’
Shalaby took his time before answering. ‘Individuals must use their own judgement, make their own decisions about what to do.’
The men around him were hanging on every word; Carver could see that Shalaby was a man of some authority.
A Single Source Page 9
