A close call

April 30 appeared to be just another mellow day in Misr. In my oblivious state it appears that I missed, by a few minutes, a bombing in Downtown, and, a bit later, missed, by a few more minutes, passing by a bus-shooting down on Salah Salem Street.

This happened shortly after I interfaced with the bureaucracy to send some boxes back to the States.  The postal inspections clerk looked at me and gave me the impression that my turn had begun.  But he continued to pay full attention to the small talk of his colleague, a headscarved and bulldog-faced lady, so for several minutes I was making false starts, spluttering bits of Arabic, trying to explain the contents of the boxes and the fact that two little boxes within one of the big boxes had actually already been inspected a few weeks ago before someone explained to me that it’s more cost-effective to send big boxes.  When he finished listening to his co-worker’s prattle he turned to me and barked, impatiently:

“What you sending!”

The oaf made me take almost everything out of the boxes, and insensitively putting in disarray the shipment of clothes and baby toys (he puzzled at one, a multi-colored plush building block, and shook it a little. Maybe he was in the target mental age group.)  He plucked books (taking Sophocles out of his cardboard sleeve to eyeball it) and board games (gazing severely at the white crystals in the egg-timer for one of the word games) from different boxes and tossed them onto a single stack, so that after he had satisfied himself that he’d looked through it all, I had to recall which fit where when I repacked it.

Toward the end of the inspection, there appeared a clean-cut, seemingly higher-ranking inspector guy with adequate English skills, who looked into my boxes and without introducing himself, asked me:

“You hov any books, political? Religious?”

I tried to stifle – and then tried not to stifle – my knee-jerk indignation. Yes, my uber-brain knew that it wasn’t worth taking a stand over this thought-policing; that these bureaucratic cogs, if offended, could easily leverage their situational power to cause a great inconvenience for me, or refuse to ship everything, or conceivably even have me investigated, perhaps casting an ungenerous glance into my visa file.  But I concluded: What the fuck.  The retrograde stupidity of censoring individuals’ personal book selections as they’re leaving the country … my paternalistic cranky side decided I had to seize the teachable moment.

In half-Arabic/half-English, I explained to the guy, in a tone that was intended to be patronizingly patient but ended up sounding jagged and nervous:

“I am American. I bought these books in America. I am sending them back to myself in America. Me. American. To America. So –”

“Yes, yes, yes,” the guy said, his glance skidding off mine as he turned his head away and looked at something further down the counter. Cowed? Not interested in making a big deal out of it?

My good sense got the better of me, but I decided to persist anyway.

“So why does it matter what kind of book? I’m sending. To myself,” I said.

The guy spun smoothly on one heel and walked out of the office. Not cowed: mentally elsewhere. Likely he had assessed that I was not the sort of guy he was supposed to be worried about and tuned me out, not difficult because he probably couldn’t understand my rapid, oddly accented English anyway.

Suddenly he reappeared and directed some rapid comments to the oafish guy. He said something about Turkey.  Defensively, the clerk retorted, “Wahid kitab!” (one book)  “It was Islamist!” the inspector pressed, sternly.  I gathered he had discovered that a suspected Muslim fundamentalist tract had slipped through. The clerk was defending himself by saying there had been only one copy, meaning the guy was hardly exporting propaganda en masse. He denied he had seen anything bound for Turkey.

The inspector whizzed off.  I asked the oafish guy if he wanted me to open the remaining little box within a box, but he waved me off, dispirited.  His slackitude seemed to be ascendant.

“Where you from ze States?” he said

“Yes, that’s right,” I replied gamely.

“Where?”

“Ah, yes, it’s, Chicago.”

Then ensued the obligatory bang-bang, Al Capone, air-tommy-gun routine that accompanies foreigners exposition on what they have heard about Chicago.  This was followed by my rote rebuttal that this sort of thing was over a long time ago, that Al Capone was gone and dead, that crime no longer ruled the windy streets.  Although I had delivered this defense of that toddling town for many years, this time I was sheepish, because just four days earlier the FBI had announced the arrests of 14 suspects connected to the Chicago mob.  The oaf accepted my propaganda as the whole office staff converged on me to expedite my shipping order. It was close to quitting time, 3 p.m., and they wanted me out of there.

I drove off, up the crosstown highway and across the overpass that curves behind the Egyptian Museum over the parking lot where the ragtag “microbus” vans queue up. It was about 3:15 p.m.  At about 3:35 p.m., at the same spot, Ehab Yassin, pursued by cops, leapt over the side and detonated his nail-filled bomb, blowing his own head off and injuring three Egyptians and four foreigners.

About an hour later the bomber’s wife and sister, both veiled, drove on the Salah Salem highway that leads to the Citadel, pulled behind a tourist bus near the gates of the City of the Dead cemetery/residential neighborhood, and fired shots into the bus’ rear window. This must have happened after 4:30 p.m.  At about 4:30 p.m., I drove my wife and son past this spot on our way to Al Azhar Park.  We had a pleasant stroll and dinner at the park and were unaware of either attack until we got home and saw the news on the Internet.

To the extent that these attacks are an aberration; if Egypt is generally safe for foreigners like me, do I owe thanks to the totalitarian government of Hosni Mubarak for rounding up the fundamentalists and eliminating them one way or another, the undemocratic tendrils of which had just touched me in the post office?  Or, as some analysts and human-rights activists claimed, is the police state a frustrating force that robs disaffected Egyptians of a political outlet and pushes them toward radical Islam?

Either way, Cairo’s reputation was immediately trashed. Not to minimize the attacks, especially since these guys reportedly were from the same crew that killed three people near the Khan al Khalili market three weeks earlier, but, put it in perspective: The attacks looked amateurish, and the perpetrators only succeeded in killing themselves.  Yet I saw headlines about Cairo being plunged into “chaos,” etc.  Feeding the perceptions of those who presume the Middle East is one continuous free-fire zone.  These reputations, once adhered, might never come off.  Just ask a Chicagoan.

--May 2005