Eighteen Days
15
many sleazy nightclubs that had sprung up in Cairo to cater to the Allied forces stationed there in the West’s second great war. Now, if you say ‘el-Kit-Kat’, everyone thinks of Daoud Abd el-Sayyed’s 1991 film with the opening shot of Mahmoud Abd el-Aziz weaving through the Embaba streets on his bicycle. A long, continuous shot – and some time during the course of it you realise the cyclist is blind. Embaba has a small airport from where you can go gliding. When my first marriage was breaking up we flew from there, in a glider, I and my just-become-ex husband. He was at the controls. I can’t think why we did that. For clarity, maybe? We – I – didn’t find it. Even the amazing spread-out fields below, the river, broad and still and – from here – docile were dimmed by my unease. And Embaba is known for three hospitals. One is a specialist rehabilitation centre where they taught the five-year-old son of Um Nagla, our help, to speak. My father snatched him back from the jaws of a ‘fraudulent charlatan’, he said, who was about to send him off for electric shock treatment – and sent him to Embaba. He’s now fifteen and speaking plenty. He says he’d carry on going to school if there was any use, but he’s not learning anything and the teachers are only there for the cash from the private lessons. The only thing that might be useful now for his life is the revolution. He berates his mother for being prepared to believe that Hosni Mubarak is ‘sorry’ and will give back our stolen money. ‘Ali,’ she tells me, ‘Ali says of Mubarak and all his men: “Before they open their mouths they’re liars; they breathe lies.” And this,’ she adds, ‘is Ali-who-couldn’t-speak.’
114h.indd 15
07/12/2011 13:56:33