Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (70 page)

13
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Roland and the jets

Wood that is wet from the river must be forced to burn
.
Ethiopian proverb

I am at Roland’s enjoying the view from his balcony. I am not sure why he is living in Cairo, maybe to get better views than you would living in England. Like me, he’s after the material. He mainly paints landscapes of the desert and sometimes cityscapes, which he makes look like views of desert cliffs and escarpments because often they include such features, the Moqattam Hills blending into the Citadel and north Cairo quite effortlessly. Roland is a big beefy bloke, painter as welder would be the type, not uncommon. In fact he told me he used to earn money as a welder before his art began to sell.

Like many artists Roland has an interest in the military, in planes especially, but tanks will do. He tells me about a battle between looters and the army he watched yesterday from his balcony. The wall of the satellite area opposite (one of Egypt’s major telecom centres with giant satellite dishes angled up to the universe), which the looters tried to breach (usually defended by policemen dozing in prison-style
watchtowers, now by the army, but for three days by no one), is pockmarked with AK74 rounds and quite a few holes from the heavy machine gun on the tank – maybe 12.7mm, Roland speculates. The holes are big, but even the 5.54mm rounds can make a hole in concrete if they hit at the right angle. So the message is: don’t expect to be safe behind a solid concrete wall unless it’s more than three inches thick, maybe a lot more. The looters, or ‘thugs’ as everyone calls them (from the direct translation of the Arabic word
baltagi
), were armed with AK74s too. The army killed two of them and hauled one other away. The rest escaped.

‘Killed them?’ I ask.

‘Yep, they certainly looked pretty dead from up here.’

This is both good and bad news. Good, primarily. When the main source of trouble is the thugs, which it is, then any deaths are a relief. If you have a family at home behind a barricaded door armed only with a headhunting
dao
I picked up in Nagaland and a couple of kitchen knives and a wooden sword, then any deaths among the bad guys are welcomed. We know they are the bad guys because they are attacking protesters whose only crime is to sit down in Tahrir Square. A bunch of kids mainly, some of whom I know quite well like Amr, who was there the night they were charged by horses and camels and said it was a lot more frightening than it looked. He said the government would have won if only they hadn’t been so stupid as to close off all the exits. Intent on a total slaughter, they missed victory and ended up defeated.

The army are considered the good guys because, though they aren’t arresting Mubarak, they are stopping the thugs from attacking ordinary people away from Tahrir. In the square they just watch and wait.

The thugs are armed gangs recruited by businessmen over the previous decade to protect their interests. When a shop has a dispute in Cairo with another shop, they send round a few blokes with iron bars to break up the shop front and dish out a few beatings. They also throw stones and even plant pots.
Our
plant pots on one occasion when the internet café below us was targeted by the furniture store above it for hanging a sign too low and thus blocking the internet café sign. The fight was thick and furious, but no real bloodshed despite the mean and deadly-looking iron bars everyone was wielding. That’s the thing about fights, wars, struggles – the number of injuries seems disproportionately lower than the armaments would suggest. Except the First World War, the Hutu–Tutsi massacre and a few other counter-examples. I suppose I
am talking about war as a means and not war as extermination.

The thugs have been swelled by prisoners let out of Tora Prison, which is just over the autostrade from where we live. Over the concrete flyover and down about half a mile of leafy suburban streets and you’re at our house. Gangs of thugs were repulsed by homeowners on Saturday night, the biggest night of battles for our neighbourhood. On Sunday morning the army put a tank on the crossroads a hundred yards from our street. A big khaki tank. The people carried sticks and knives to defend their shops and homes and set up roadblocks. This is a posh neighbourhood. I always spoke English at the roadblocks and usually someone smiled. Egyptians have a great sense of humour, possibly the world’s best, when they are not scared. When they get scared they lose their sense of humour totally. I once drove through a checkpoint without permission in the Sinai and dared crack a joke to the fuming officer who stopped me. Normally he would have laughed, but in the Sinai they are scared and it was only because I had my son with me that I wasn’t arrested and given a hard time. As it was, he shouted a great deal at me. Nervous. Scared. No sense of humour. I tell Roland as we look out and we agree that the English sense of humour, though vastly overrated, is not allowed to disappear when the shit hits the fan. It’s supposed to flourish. You put a brave face on it. Actually I can think of several Egyptians who were cracking jokes the whole time, so maybe I am completely wrong.

But Roland and I are feeling like we have been in a war and it’s a good feeling until we hear shots. ‘Over there,’ says Roland – we are both getting better at this game. Roland has his binoculars but we’ve both seen the movie. The glasses may catch the light, give our position away. ‘Shall we go in?’ I say. We go in and watch from inside through the open balcony doors. Why risk it? That’s a revolution for you: you’re always asking yourself, ‘Why risk it?’ So you end up holed up at home and not going out. Except it’s perfectly safe outside, maybe even safer than before because there are far fewer cars.

In a car you feel safer until you see a hold-up, then you feel scared, trapped; you work out how to open the car door, roll out into the dust and leg it. You understand pretty early on why war correspondents keep doing what, on the surface, looks like a shit job. They do it for the
incredible
sense of newness you get when a country suddenly goes from normal to unfuckingpredictable. I walked out of my house, down towards the Mubarak Library. The street was empty except for a
few burned-out cars, a police truck still smouldering and a few young men taking pictures of said truck on their phones. They all looked nice enough guys. The only scare was about five motorbikes each with two up roaring by.
Baltagis
ride bikes usually followed by a couple of Peugeots crammed with blokes. But they are gone. The Mubarak Library is fine. No looting, no fire, even the flag is still flying, and the two caretakers are wearing their blue and yellow uniforms looking wary but reasonably cheerful.

This incredible sense of newness, this feeling that you are an explorer in a new land, doesn’t go away because every day there are new developments, new outrages and new signs. One day the US Embassy bus is attacked by a mob – stoned, the news report says. This sounds . . . terrible, until I talk to someone who was actually on the bus: one stone went through a back window and everyone is fine. But it’s enough to convince even the diehard Americans to leave. I start to formulate a rule: if there is no local evidence of something reported then it’s an exaggeration or an outright lie. Foreigners are being attacked, comes the report. I see no evidence of it in my neighbourhood, but then all the foreigners are leaving. Every day, in forlorn little convoys of microbuses and their favoured giant 4x4s. I can’t help thinking, ‘Fucking cowards, fuck you you arsehole businessman, you oil worker, you bank scumbag. You lord it over everyone but when the going gets tough you leg it! Fuck you!’

A day later I am enquiring about ‘the last flight out’ offered by the British Embassy, who, after they have ascertained that we are truly British, are very helpful in that understated, competent way the British excel at. If 9/11 had happened in Britain the emergency services would have got everyone out alive, one thinks on such occasions, though of course plenty would disagree and probably volubly too. The American in the airport I see blubbing is quite a sight. He is about fifty-five, as fat as a cream cake, cone-shaped in his Hawaiian shirt. ‘I been here twenty-five years. Twenty-five good years,’ he keeps blubbing. Come on, chum, put a sock in it. Obviously he loves the expat lifestyle and has made it permanent. The barbies, the big cars, the trips to the beach, horseriding round the Pyramids at dawn, getting to shout at people lower down the food chain than you. Put a sock in it, fatso, you’ll live to play another day. But that is all in the future after my capitulation, my caving in, my fleeing from the revolution.

After leaving Roland’s I increase my range to visit my pal Matthew,
a librarian at the American University. On the way I hear lots of shots quite close. When I arrive at Matthew’s he is packing up, ready to leave. I tell him things aren’t too bad, but I am interrupted by the longest burst of gunfire I have yet heard. Really loud. It’s hard to argue against in any sense. Matthew says the other American teachers agreed to defend the block by staying up all night in shifts. But they started drinking about nine and by eleven-thirty they were too pissed to do much, so they all went to bed leaving Matthew to guard the block (with the Egyptian doorman and his assistant) all night long. In a way it didn’t matter since they weren’t attacked, but understandably Matthew is pissed off, and tired. On my own building, because it is right next door to a mosque, there is no shortage of defenders. The mosque PA, which is bolted to a pole about a foot from our balcony, is now a source of comfort and support rather than loud call-to-prayer broadcasts at 5 a.m. The mosque relays information throughout the night, ‘The thugs are in the next street. The army is at the crossroads. More thugs in Gazeir Street.’ It is very comforting. Private enterprise is represented in our street by two internet cafés, frequented by small boys who lean on our cars and break off the wing-mirrors. The cafés have provided nothing for the community since I have been there bar a place for small kids to play shoot-’em-up games that they also play at home. In this time of trouble the cafés are locked down with iron gratings over the windows. The mosque never closes and is a real force for unity and help in the community when it is under attack. And I don’t even like the caretaker at the mosque, a grumpy old devil with a huge praying mark on his forehead.

So Matthew gone, Roland phones and says he is going too. My wife Samia says she will stay and I should go. I say I’ll stay, but the next day there are reports that more foreigners are being targeted downtown. It gets harder to argue against rumours when they seem to affect you personally. I start to rationalise. My son is refusing to go outside, whereas my daughter at least walks round the neighbourhood with me when I make a sortie. My son has built a barricade of all his toys which he calls ‘the nest’. It seems perverse to carry on in this sort of scenario when we could be back in England watching it all on TV at his grandma’s house, playing footie in the park and listening to audiobooks of horrible histories. So quite quickly I decide to go. Buying the tickets online (they’ve turned the internet back on now) is done in two ticks. We are off tomorrow, it seems, just like that.

14
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The author leaves his story

The axe does not sharpen itself
. Sudanese proverb

I had been here seven years; I thought I would live here seven more, like the biblical lean and fat years, seven seemed a good number. Now I was leaving, running for home, another home.

‘I’ve never seen a real tank before,’ says my son on the way to the airport, ‘and now I’ve seen nine.’ Yep, real tanks with swivelling guns that line up on you as you approach, tanks at every motorway sliproad, on-ramp, watch out the army is out in force. The country is locked down tight, no one could move around the ring road – which we are using to get to the airport – if these tanks decided to trundle into the centre lane.

I made my plan, which was basically to go early but not too early. The curfew was until 7 a.m., or was it 8? No one seemed to know. I knew that first thing the local barricades were still up and people were tired and jumpy from a night of watching. By about 9 a.m. things were more normal, everyday life had started again. By 11 a.m. they were starting to get a bit nervous, which worsened until the curfew again at 3 p.m., or was it 4? So, tactically, the best time to be on the ring road was 9–9.30 a.m., even though our flight wasn’t until 2 p.m.

Yes, compared to that SAS raid on Benghazi I’d been reading about only the other day it was tame stuff: being driven in a taxi by our trusted taxi driver Gamel, we were stopped only once by a fairly bored bunch of soldiers who wanted to look in the boot as we approached the airport. Everyone was alert in the car, waiting for something to go wrong. It felt exciting but also boring. The boring part of war is you can’t get on with your own life. At first that’s a giant relief, and I’m sure a lot of heroes are people whose own lives were tedious and irritating and war offered a welcome release. But my life, though moderately dull by any standards, still held a few attractions, and once all the fun of sneaking around and going through roadblocks and checkpoints and seeing what places had been looted and what hadn’t, once that became, not routine, but somehow less interesting, then I wanted to get on with what I wanted to do, such as make a trip up the Nile to Luxor to investigate something I needed for this book, so though it was an interesting experience it wasn’t a life-changing
one. I wasn’t about to drop everything and become a war correspondent.

Partly it was the fact that I didn’t have the same instincts as war-correspondent types. For my friend Steve, who’s been shot at by Israelis, carried wounded Palestinian children and made a film about the aftermath of the Jenin massacre, the revolution meant finding out what was really going on. The night snipers were defending the Interior Ministry; he kept going closer and closer until he passed a group bringing back a dead body. They begged him to go back but he went on. Then he met some more with another dead body who begged him even more strongly to turn back. ‘That begging wasn’t the normal kind of alarmist begging you get in Egypt, it was quiet, it had the ring of truth all right.’ He turned back. But not before he had shot film of the hospitals and prowled around all over the place. And, unlike me, who look Egyptian enough until I open my mouth, Steve looks foreign, foreign and tall, and carrying a couple of cameras. But still without fear of going anywhere. My own inclination was to avoid all the places that others were going to. Why go to Tahrir Square? Why snoop around with a camera? It wasn’t my country. It wasn’t my revolution. I felt this quite strongly. I guess it meant I wasn’t a revolutionary at heart, whatever my former protestations had been. I liked sneaking around my neighbourhood, seeing how
that
had changed, seeing what I knew and what was familiar, but I hardly ever went downtown these days, and anyway, what would I do? Chant?