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Cairo
brought bottles of water and hand them out. Months later, my brother – an IT man and Egyptologist – will, with friends, put together an initiative to dismantle the security establishment, another to overhaul pre-university education, another to set up a national employment bureau . . . Today, this is his and his wife’s first action for the revolution. Salma and Mariam and I decide we’ll walk across 6 October Bridge and up the Corniche into Tahrir, so my brother drops us off in Agouza, at the foot of the steps leading up to the bridge. We run up the steps and find ourselves facing a cordon of Central Security soldiers blocking our way. The bridge crosses Gezira Island and passes over the Gezira Club. My nieces, twins, had both been champion gymnasts in their childhood and teens and the Gezira was their club. Now twenty-two, they could easily still pass for seventeen. I take their elbows and stride up to the line of soldiers: ‘Excuse us, my daughters are late for their training—’ pointing below us at the club grounds. The line opens courteously. I love these young men. I love them, and I don’t want them to be part of Central Security. In fact we’ve got a case in court proposing that using conscripts for Security is unconstitutional; conscription may be necessary to protect us against invasion or aggression. But to use conscripts to protect the government of the day against the people cannot be right. We get to the middle of the bridge before we realise that there are no cars, that the air is dim and fumy and that the few people around us are not moving forward. There’s something of Dante about the spectacle. Isolated
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07/12/2011 13:56:33