Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

AN EGYPTIAN IN BAGHDAD 1990

THE LAST TIME I spoke to Nabeel was over a year ago. He was in Baghdad. I was in New York. It wasn't easy getting through. The directory listed a code for Baghdad, but after days of trying, all I'd got was a recorded message telling me that the number I'd dialed didn't exist.

In the end I had to book a call with the operator. She took a while, but eventually there was a voice at the other end, speaking in the blunt, rounded Arabic of Iraq: "Yes? Who is it?"

Nabeel's family had told me that he was working as an assistant in a photographer's shop. The owner was an Iraqi, and Nabeel had been working for him since 1986, when he left his village in Egypt and went to Iraq. There was a telephone in the shop and the owner was relatively kind, a relatively kind Iraqi, and he allowed Nabeel to receive calls.

I imagined him as a big, paunchy man, Nabeel's boss, sitting at the end of a counter, behind a cash box, with the telephone beside him and a Kodacolor poster of a snow-clad mountain on the wall above. He was wearing a blue jallabeyya and a white lace cap; he had a carefully trimmed mustache and a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket. The telephone beside him was of the old-fashioned kind, black and heavy, and it had a brass lock fastened in its dial. The boss kept the key, and Nabeel and the other assistants had to ask for it when they wanted to make a call. It was late at night in New York, so it had to be morning in Baghdad. The shop must just have opened. They had probably had no customers yet.

"Is Nabeel there?" I asked.

"Who?" said the voice.

"Nabeel Idris Badawy," I said. "The Egyptian."

He grunted. "Wa min inta?" he said. "And who're you?"

"I'm a friend of his," I said. "Tell him it's his friend from India. He'll know."

"What's that?" he said. "From where?"

"From India, ya raiyis," I said. "Could you tell him? And quickly if you please, for I'm calling from America."

"From America?" he shouted down the line. "But you said you're Indian?"

"Yes, I am — I'm just in America on a visit. Nabeel quickly, if you please, ya raiyis…"

I heard him shout across the room: "Ya Nabeel, somebody wants to talk to you, some Indian or something…"

I could tell from Nabeel's first words of greeting that my call had taken him completely by surprise. It was only natural. Eight years had passed since I'd left his village. He and his family had befriended me when I was living there in 1980 and 1981, doing research. I was then in my mid-twenties; Nabeel was a few years younger. We had become close friends, and for the first few years after I'd left, we had written letters back and forth between India and Egypt. But then he had gone to do his national service in the army, and he'd stopped writing. In time I had stopped writing too. He had no way of knowing that I would be in the United States on a visit that year. Until a few weeks ago I hadn't known that he was in Baghdad. I knew now because I had just been to Egypt and had visited his village and his family.

"Nabeel's not here, ya Amitab," his sister-in-law, Fawzia, had said to me, once she recovered from the shock of seeing me at the door. "He's not in the village — he's gone to Iraq."

Ushering me in, she fussed about distractedly, pumping her kerosene stove, fetching tea and sugar. She was a pretty, good-humored woman who had always made me welcome in their house. I had been in the village when she was married to Nabeel's older brother Aly.

"Nabeel left about two years ago," she said. "He went with his cousin Ismail, do you remember him?"

I did. He was Nabeel's best friend as well as his cousin, although they could not have been more different. Ismail was lively, energetic, always ready with a joke or a pun; Nabeel, on the other hand, was thoughtful and serious, with a marked disinclination for vigorous activity of any kind. When he made his way down the lanes of the village, it was in a stately, considered kind of way, in marked contrast to the caperings of his cousin.

"They left for Iraq soon after they finished their national service," said Fawzia. "They went to make money."

They had rented a room in Baghdad with some other young men from the village, she said, and they all lived and cooked and ate together. She had taught Nabeel and Ismail to cook a few things before they left, so they managed all right. Ismail was a construction laborer. There was good money to be had in construction; Nabeel earned less as a photographer's assistant, but he liked his job. Ismail had been trying to get him to go into construction, but Nabeel wasn't interested.

"You know him," she said, laughing. "He always wanted a job where he wouldn't have to get his clothes dirty."

Later, when her husband, Aly, had come home from the fields and we had all had dinner, she gave me the number of the shop in Baghdad. Once every couple of months or so she and Nabeel's brothers would make a trip to a post office in a nearby town and telephone him in Baghdad.

"It costs a lot," she said, "but you can hear him like he was in the next house."

Nabeel couldn't telephone them, of course, but now and again he would speak into a cassette recorder and send them a tape. He and his brothers had all been through high school; Nabeel himself even had a college degree. But they still found the spoken word more reassuring than the written.

"You must hear his voice on the machine," said Aly, producing a tape. He placed it carefully inside a huge cassette recorder cum radio and we gathered around to listen. Nabeel's voice was very solemn, and he was speaking like a Cairene, almost as though he'd forgotten the village dialect.

"Does he always talk like that now?" I asked Fawzia.

"Oh no." She laughed. "He's talking like that because it's a cassette. On the telephone he sounds just like he used to."

Nabeel said almost nothing about himself and his life in Iraq, just that he was well and that his salary had gone up. He listed in detail the names of all the people he wanted them to convey his greetings to — members of his lineage, people in the village, his school friends. Then he told them about everyone from the village who was in Iraq — that so-and-so was well, that someone had moved to another city, and that someone else was about to go home. For the rest he gave his family precise instructions about what they were to do with the money he was sending them — about the additions they were to make to the house, exactly how the rooms should look, how much they should spend on the floors, the windows, the roof. His brothers listened, rapt, though they must have heard the tape through several times already.

Later Aly wrote down Nabeel's address for me. It consisted of a number on a numbered street in "New Baghdad." I pictured to myself an urban development project of the kind that flourishes in the arid hinterlands of Cairo and New Delhi — straight, treeless streets and blocks of yellow buildings divided into "Pockets," "Phases," and "Zones."

"You must telephone him," one of Nabeel's younger brothers said. "He'll be so pleased. Do you know, he's kept all your letters, wrapped in a plastic bag? He still talks of you, a lot. Tell me, didn't you once say to him…"

And then he recounted, almost word for word, a conversation I had once had with Nabeel. It was about something trivial, about my college in Delhi, but for some reason I had written it down in my diary that very day, while it was still fresh in memory. I had read through my diaries of that time again recently. That was why I knew that Nabeel's brother had repeated that conversation, or at least a part of it, almost verbatim, in near exact detail. I was amazed. It seemed to me an impossible, deeply moving defiance of time and the laws of hearsay and memory.

"You can be sure that I will telephone him," I said to Nabeel's brother. "I'll telephone him soon, from America."

"You must tell him that we are well and that he should send another cassette."

"Won't he be surprised," said Fawzia, "when he hears Amitab's voice on the phone? He'll think someone's playing a joke on him."

"We'll write and tell him," said Aly. "We'll write tomorrow so he won't be surprised. We'll tell him that you're going to phone him from America."

But they hadn't written: the surprise in Nabeel's voice as he greeted me over the phone was proof of that. And I, for my part, even though I had the advantage, was almost as amazed as Nabeel, though for a different reason. When I was living in their village, in 1980 and '81, Nabeel and Ismail had had very definite plans for their immediate future: they wanted salaried jobs in the Agriculture Ministry. It would not have occurred to any of us then to think that within a few years they would both be abroad and that I would be able to speak to them on the phone from thousands of miles away.

There was only one telephone in the village then. It had never worked, as far as anyone knew. It was not meant to — it was really a badge of office, a scepter. It belonged to the government, and it resided in the house of the village headman. When a headman was voted out in the local elections, the telephone was ritually removed from his house and taken to the victor's. It was carried at the head of a procession, accompanied by drums and gunshots, as though it were a saint's relics. "We carried the telephone that year," people would say, meaning "We swept the elections."

Nabeel's family was one of the poorest in the village — and the village was not by any means prosperous. Few families in the village had more than five feddans of land, but most had one or two. Nabeel's family had none at all. That was one of the reasons that he and his brothers had all got an education: schools and colleges were free, and they had no land to claim their time.

Nabeel lived with his parents in a three-room adobe hut, along with Aly and Fawzia and their three other brothers. Aly worked in the fields for a daily wage when there was work to be had; their father carried a tiny salary as a village watchman. He was a small, frail man with sunken cheeks and watery gray eyes. As a watchman he had the possession of a gun, an ancient Enfield, that was kept in a locked chest under his bed. He said that he'd last had occasion to use it some fifteen years ago, when somebody spotted a gang of thieves running through Hassan Bassiuni's cornfields. The thieves had escaped, but the gun had mowed down half the field — it was really very much like a blunderbuss. He was very proud of it. Once when a fire broke out in Shahata Hammoudah's house and everyone was busy doing what they could, I noticed Nabeel's father running in the opposite direction. When I next looked around, he was standing at attention in front of the burning house, holding his gun, smiling benignly.

Nabeel's mother, a dark, fine-boned woman, secretly despaired of her husband. "He's been defeated by the world," she would say sometimes. "There's no one to stand beside Nabeel and his brothers except themselves."

Now, eight years later, Nabeel's father and mother were both dead. "And the saddest thing," Fawzia said to me, "is that they didn't live to see how things have changed for us."

The three mud-walled rooms were gone now. In their place was a bungalow, or at least its skeleton — four or five rooms, in a largely unfinished state but built of brick and cement and entirely habitable. There was provision for a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, as well as another entire apartment upstairs, exactly like the one below. That was where Nabeel would live once he was married, Fawzia said to me. She, for her part, was content; in her house she now had a television set, a cassette recorder, and a washing machine.

It wasn't just her life that had changed. When I first came to the village, in 1980, there were only three or four television sets there, and they belonged to the handful of men who owned fifteen to twenty feddans of land, the richest men in the village. Those men still had their fifteen to twenty feddans of land and their black-and-white television sets. It was the families who had once been thought of as the poor folk of the village whose homes were now full of all the best-known brand names in Japan — television sets, washing machines, kitchen appliances, cameras… I could not have begun to imagine a change on this scale when I left the village in 1981. If I had not witnessed it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it possible.

It was a kind of revolution, but it had happened a long way away. It had been created entirely by the young men who had gone to work in Iraq, once that country began to experience severe labor shortages because of its war with Iran. They were carried along by a great wave of migration. In the late 1980s there were estimated to be between two and three million Egyptians in Iraq. Nobody knew for sure: the wave had surged out of the country too quickly to be measured. All of Nabeel's contemporaries were gone now — all the young men with high school educations and no jobs and no land and nothing to do but play football and lounge around the water taps when the girls went to fetch water in the evenings. Some of the old men used to say that they would all go to the bad. But in the end it was they who had transformed the village.

"It's we who've been the real gainers in the war," one of the village schoolteachers said to me while I was walking down the lanes, gaping at all the newly built houses and buildings. "The Iraqis are doing all the fighting, it's they who're dying. The Arab countries are paying them to break the back of Khomeini's Islamic revolution. For them it's a matter of survival. But in the meantime, while Iraqis are dying, others are making money. But it won't last — that money's tainted, and the price is going to be paid later, someday."

The young men who'd left were paying a price already. "Life is really hard there," their families said. "You never know what's going to happen from day to day." And they would tell stories about fights, about lone Egyptians being attacked on the streets, about men being forced to work inhuman hours, about how the Iraqi women would look at Egyptian men from their windows, because so many of their own men were dead, and how it always led to trouble, because the Iraqis would find out and kill both the woman and the Egyptian.

"How does Nabeel like it in Iraq?" I asked his brother Aly.

"He's fine," said Aly. "He's all right."

"How do you know?"

"That's what he says on the cassettes," he said. "I'm sure he's all right."

"I hope so," I said.

He was frowning now. "God knows," he said. "People say life is hard out there."

Nabeel could not tell me as much over the telephone, with his boss listening. But he was well, he said, and so was his cousin Ismail, and they were managing fine, living with their relatives and friends from back home. In turn he asked me about India, my job, my family. Then I heard a noise down the line; it sounded like another voice in the same room. Nabeel broke off to say, "Coming, just a moment."

I said quickly, "I'm going back to India soon. I'll try and visit you on the way."

"We'll be expecting you," he said. In the background I could hear the voice again, louder now.

"You'd better go now," I said.

"I'll tell Ismail you're coming," he said hurriedly. "We'll wait for you."

But the year passed and the visit eluded me.

2

It was exactly three weeks since Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and miraculously, Abu-Ali, the old shopkeeper, was on his feet. That was how he happened to see me as I walked down the road past his window.

Nabeel's village was just a mile and a half away, and I was on my way there when Abu-Ali sent a child running after me. Abu-Ali's house was where the asphalt road ended and the dirt track began. Taxi drivers would not go any farther.

Abu-Ali was standing by the window again cradling a radio, twiddling the knob. He had always behaved as though all the village's worries had fallen on his shoulders. Now it looked as though he had taken on all of Egypt's.

The radio was a big one, with a built-in cassette recorder, but in Abu-Ali's huge, swollen hands it seemed as slim and fragile as an advanced model of a calculator. It spat out a medley of electronic sounds as the pointer flashed across its face. But the sounds were lost; the noise in the room was already deafening. Abu-Ali's cousin's daughter was getting married next door. A crowd of women and children had gathered in the lane outside their house. A boy was beating a tin washbasin with a spoon, and the women and children were clapping in time and chanting, "Ya rumman, ya rumman," singing of the bride as the bloom of a pomegranate.

At intervals Abu-Ali rose from his bed, went to the window, glared at the women and children outside, shuffled back, and collapsed onto his bed again. This was an astonishing feat. When I first knew him years ago, he was already so fat that he found it nearly impossible to leave his bed. Now he was fatter still. Every time he stood up, his belly surged away from him like backwash leaving a beach. It was pure greed, his neighbors had always said; he ate the way other people force-fed geese — he could eat two chickens and a pot of rice at one sitting. And now that there was all this Iraqi money in his house, that was exactly what he did sometimes — ate two whole chickens and a pot of rice, right after the midday prayers.

"Ate it," muttered Abu-Ali, shuffling across the room yet again. "The son of a bitch just ate it like it was a chicken's liver. Saw a tasty little morsel and just swallowed it."

He sounded envious: an appetite was something he could understand.

"So what do you expect?" someone said. The room was quite full now: several men had stopped by to see Abu-Ali on their way to the wedding. "What was Kuwait but a tasty little morsel cooked up by the British and sucked dry by the Americans?"

"Just ate it!" Abu-Ali twirled the knob of the radio, sending the pointer screeching through a succession of stations. "BBC, BBC," he muttered, "where's that son-of-a-bitch BBC?"

A distant, haranguing voice suddenly burst out of the radio, screaming shrilly. Abu-Ali started back in surprise, almost dropping the radio. "Who's this son of a bitch now?"

"That's Damascus," said someone.

"No, it's those son-of-a-bitch Americans broadcasting in Arabic," said someone else.

"No, it's Riyadh," said Abu-Ali. "It sounds like a Saudi."

"Riyadh is where he should have gone," said another man. "But he didn't — stopped too soon. It's those Saudi sons of bitches who should have been fixed."

I jogged the elbow of the man sitting next to me. I knew him well once; he used to teach in a nearby school. Now he was teaching in the Yemen; he'd come home on a visit, intending to leave once the summer holidays ended. But his wife wouldn't let him go; she had four children to bring up, and she was not going to let him vanish into a war zone.

"Do you know if Nabeel Badawy is back from Iraq yet?" I asked him.

"Nabeel?" he said. He'd been looking distracted, anxious, ever since he came into the room. Now he looked as though he'd been dazed by the noise and the cigarette smoke. The man next to him had his arm firmly in his grasp; he was shouting into his other ear, his voice hoarse.

"The worst sons of bitches, the most ungrateful, do you know who they are?" he shouted.

"Nabeel Idris Badawy," I said insistently. "You remember him?"

"The Palestinians," shouted the man hoarsely. "The worst sons of bitches."

"Nabeel Idris Badawy," I repeated. "From Nashawy?"

"From Nashawy?" said the schoolteacher. "How many wars have we fought for them, you tell me? Haven't I lost my own brother?"

"Nabeel Idris Mustafa Badawy," said the schoolteacher jubilantly, his voice rising to a shout. "He was in Iraq — my nephew told me."

"Them and the Israelis, God forsake them, the sons of bitches. In the end they're always at the bottom of everything."

"I know Nabeel's in Iraq," I shouted back. "But do you know if he's back yet?"

He thought for a moment and then shook his head. "No," he said, "I can't tell you. There are so many boys over there, you know, it's impossible to keep track. Mabrouk Hussein is still there, you know, my own nephew. You remember him? And there are others from this village — there's Fahmy and Abusa and…"

He began to repeat the names, as everyone else who had come into the room had done. The village was a very small one, no more than 350 souls, just a hamlet really. I knew it well when I lived in the area. At that time only one man from the village was abroad; he taught Arabic in a school in Zaire. But over the past few years more than a dozen of its young men had left. Most had gone to Iraq, a couple to Jordan (it was almost the same thing). Several had returned since the beginning of the year, but five still remained, trapped in Iraq. People said their names over and over again, as though to conjure them out of Iraq, back to the village: Mabrouk, who used to keep goal; Abusa—"the Frown" — who never smiled; Fahmy, who used to ride out to the fields on a sheep. I remembered them coming to visit me in the evenings, full of questions: "What do you grow in India? Do you have schools? Do you have weddings? Rain? An army?" They were very young. None of them had ever been farther than the local town. The machines with which they were most familiar were their kababis—the Persian wheels their cattle drove, round and round for hours every day, to water their fields. Mabrouk had once come running to my room, hugely excited, and dragged me away to his house to see the brand-new water pump his family had bought. It was very important for him and his family that I take a look at it, for like all the pumps in the area, it was from India (the generic name for water pump was makana hindi, "the Indian machine"). No matter that I had said, time after time, that I knew nothing about water pumps, I was always asked for an opinion when somebody bought one.

This one was exactly like the others: a big green machine with a spout and an exhaust pipe. They had hung an old shoe on the spout and stuck an incense stick in the exhaust pipe to protect it from the evil eye. I knocked on the spout with my knuckles and patted its diesel tank in a well-informed kind of way. "What do you think?" Mabrouk's father said. "Is it all right?"

I knocked a little harder, frowning.

He was anxious now: "So, what do you think?"

I smiled. "It's a very good one — excellent."

There was a sigh of relief. "Get the Indian doctor some tea."

Mabrouk had shaken my hand. "I knew you would be able to tell…"

And now Mabrouk was in the immediate vicinity of chemical and nuclear weapons, within a few minutes' striking distance of the world's most advanced machinery. It would be he who would have to pay the price of the violence that was invented in quiet, pastoral laboratories in Heidelberg and Berkeley.

"Do you think the Americans are ever going to leave the sacred land?" a young man said at the top of his voice. People fell silent, listening. Outside, the clapping seemed suddenly louder, the girls' voices more insistent.

"Never," he shouted. "Never — they're never going to leave the sacred places. Now that they're there, they're going to stay till the end of time. They've finally achieved what they'd never managed in a thousand years of history. And who's responsible? The Saudis — the sons of bitches."

"Ya rumman, ya rumman!" The beat was growing faster; the spoons were drumming out a crescendo on the washbasins. Glancing out of the window, I saw three young men walking down the lane. They had all recently returned from Iraq. Abu-Ali's youngest son was among them. The girls stole looks at them as they walked past, singing at the tops of their voices. They were hoping perhaps that they'd stop and join in the singing and dancing, as young men used to. But these three youths walked straight past them. They had small, derisory smiles under their clipped mustaches. They were embarrassed at the sight of their sisters and cousins drumming out a beat on washbasins while waiting for a groom who was going to arrive in a pickup truck. They had grown accustomed to seeing weddings with big bands and hired BMWs. They were savvy, street-smart in some ways — some of them could recite the prices of the best brand-name goods as though they'd memorized a catalogue. They could tell you what counted as a good price for anything ranging from a pair of Nike shoes to a video camera. If you'd paid a piaster more, you'd been had, someone had "laughed at you." The girls were going to be disappointed. These young men were not going to tie up their jallabeyyas and dance to the rhythm of dented washbasins.

"Why'd you think the Americans and the British have always supported those son-of-a-bitch sheiks?" my friend the schoolteacher said. "Why do you think? Because it was the easiest way to get back all the money they spent on oil — it all went straight back to their casinos and hotels. And they knew someday they would be able to get back here through those sheiks, the sons of bitches."

The girls were beginning to irritate Abu-Ali. He shuffled up to the window and yelled, "Will you stop that noise? Can't you see we're trying to listen to the news on the radio?"

His voice was legendary: it shook the mud floor. The girls stopped their singing for a moment, taken by surprise. But soon they started again, softly at first and then louder, gradually. The wedding had been planned a year ago, long before the invasion. They'd been looking forward to it for a long time; they had no wish whatever to forgo one of their few diversions.

"Didn't I tell you to stop that noise?" Abu-Ali ran out of breath, mopped his forehead.

"He's been like this ever since the invasion," the schoolteacher whispered to me. "Taken it personally."

In fact Abu-Ali had been lucky. His three sons, who'd all spent long periods of time in Iraq, were back in Egypt now. The youngest had returned just a month before the invasion. "People say that God was watching over him," his mother had said to me when I went into the house to see her. "They say, 'You should praise God for bringing him back in time'—as though I didn't know it."

Abu-Ali had bought a Datsun pickup truck with his sons' earnings. It was making good money now, ferrying goods between the nearby towns and villages. He had also built apartments for his sons, all of them expensively furnished with the heavy, gilded furniture that was favored in rural Egypt. Still, there was one more thing he wanted: a car. He had been just about ready to send two of his sons back to Iraq when the war broke out. He'd even bought the tickets.

"That Saddam Hussein," he said. "How could anyone know he'd do this?"

I could have told him of a conversation I'd recorded in my diary on September 30, 1980, when I was living down the road in Nashawy. It was a conversation with one of Nabeel's cousins, a bright young medical student, about the Iran-Iraq war:

I asked him whether he thought that after the war Saddam Hussein was going to emerge as the strong man of the Middle East. He said no, he never would, because Egypt's army was the strongest in the Middle East, and perhaps in the world; because Egypt's soldiers were the best in the world!

I could still remember thinking about that exclamation mark.

"That Saddam Hussein," snarled Abu-Ali. "I want to kill him."

His youngest son came into the room and was amazed to see me. After the greetings were over, he said, "Do you know, I used to work for Indians in Iraq? But they were a different kind of Indian — Shia Muslims, Bohras. I used to work in a hotel they ran in Karbala. It's a great pilgrimage center, you know."

I was startled: I had only very recently met a group of Bohra Muslims. On my way to Cairo from Calcutta, I'd had to stop at Amman airport to catch a connecting flight. I'd met them at the airport. They'd been stranded in Karbala for several days after the invasion. They'd been very worried, because some members of their party had American and British passports. But when they got to the border, it had been all right; the guards had let them through without a word. "We're Muslims," they said, "so it didn't matter." In Karbala they'd stayed in a Bohra hotel, they'd said — very well run, clean, comfortable. It was an odd coincidence.

"Why did you come through Jordan at a time like this?" he asked. I explained that the trip had been arranged a long time back.

"I traveled through Jordan too once," he said. "It was a nice place then. But look at it now. Have you seen the pictures on the TV news? They're frightening. That man…"

"I want to kill that Saddam Hussein," bellowed his father. "He's spoiled everything." The thought of that lost car was sawing into his flesh.

"This war's going to be a disaster," said his son, shaking his head. But he had a look of relief on his face: at least his father wouldn't be able to send him back there now.

"Did you ever come across Nabeel in Iraq?" I asked.

"Nabeel?" he repeated after me. "Nabeel who?"

"Nabeel Idris Mustafa Badawy," I said. "From Nashawy."

He thought for a moment and shook his head. "No. I didn't even know he was there. It's a big country, and there are so many Egyptians there…"

A pickup truck drew up outside in a flurry of horns. The washbasins began to crash together, the women began to ululate. The groom had arrived. Abu-Ali paid no notice. He was shouting: "…he doesn't know how much harm he's doing to his country…"

Many of the men in the room went rushing out to receive the groom. I slipped out with them, unnoticed. Abu-Ali was still shouting: "He has to be killed, as soon as possible."

Everywhere in Egypt people seemed to be talking of killing. In the taxi out from Cairo, the six passengers had all agreed that Saddam had to be killed. But then somebody had added, "And what about the Man here? Hasn't he got to go first?" This met with a chorus of approval: "He's going to die, the Man"; "…and if someone wants to kill him, he can count on me for help."

Never before in Egypt had I heard ordinary people so much as criticize their president in public, among strangers, far less talk of killing him, even if only metaphorically. I looked out the window, half expecting the driver to stop the taxi. But soon enough he too was talking of killing — the Iraqis, the Americans, Palestinians, Israelis, Saudis…

It was as though the whole country had been startled suddenly out of sleep and fallen out of bed, fists clenched, swinging wildly at everything in sight.

The fact is that it has been a long sleep, and on the whole the dreams have been good. So good that in the dreamtime Egypt has floated away from earth into the upper atmosphere.

For the past few years the principal sources of Egypt's national income have been these: the repatriated earnings of its workers abroad, Western aid, and tourism. Oil and fees from the Suez Canal follow, but not close behind. Life aboveground — where most countries have their economies — has contributed increasingly little. A few decades ago Egypt used to grow enough food to feed itself and export some too. Since then, in exactly the period in which India and China have gone from dependency to self-sufficiency in food, Egypt has reached a point where it has to import as much as 70 percent of its grain. To pay for its food, it needs foreign exchange. And so tourism has become a desperately serious business, a matter of economic survival.

Minds are hard at work thinking of ways to make Egypt ever more attractive to tourists, ever more fantastic. A year or so ago they hit upon the idea of turning a town into an opera set. Luxor, they decided — the ancient Thebes — would be just the right setting for Verdi's Aïda. It needed a fair bit of work to turn a real town and some real ancient Egyptian ruins into an Italian's fantasy of ancient Egypt, but they did a thorough job. Luxor got new roads, new hotels, and miles of brand-new wharfs along the east bank of the Nile. The wharfs are now lined with steamers, often two or three deep: great floating hotels, several stories high, with many decks of cabins as well as restaurants, bars, saunas, gyms, swimming pools. They bring ever-increasing numbers of tourists to Luxor. Last year Egypt had about two million tourists. Almost every single one of them passed through Luxor.

A very large proportion of the tourists come in the steamers. They are taken to the ruins and back again in air-conditioned coaches. The adventurous few take horse-drawn carriages. All the petty difficulties and irritations of traveling in Egypt have been done away with; the only Egyptians the tourists ever encounter are tour guides and waiters (the number is not negligible).

Outside the temple in Karnak is a large notice, prominently displayed. It catches the eye because it is entirely in Arabic. The notices at the monuments are usually in several languages — Arabic, English, French, and sometimes even German. But in more ways than one, this notice is not like the others. It contains a list of do's and don'ts for Egyptian visitors — don't make a noise, don't climb the monuments. It ends by exhorting them to behave in a manner "appropriate to Egyptian culture." I read it carefully. It makes me think of my aunt in Calcutta, who wanted her money back after visiting the lion sanctuary at the Gir forest in Gujarat. "Why," she yelled at the travel agent, "they were just sleeping, lying in the dust like lizards. Shouldn't someone tell them that they've got to behave like lions?"

I think of stealing the notice, but the tourist police are watching. It seems to me like an icon of the contemporary Middle East: something inestimably precious is found under the earth, and immediately everybody on top is expected to adjust their behavior accordingly. In this case the pipeline doesn't take anything away — it brings people in and whisks them through, hermetically sealed.

In the evenings, when the cool breeze blows in from the Nile, the people of Luxor gather on the promenade along the riverfront. The steamers are brilliantly lit. They are a bit like glass cases at an aquarium: they seem to display entire cross-sections of an ecological niche. The strollers lean over the railings and watch: there's a honeymooning couple, peering nervously from behind the curtains of their cabin, people sitting at the bar, a trim old lady pumping away at a cycling machine, the waiters watching television. The best time to watch the steamers is dinnertime. The tourists file up the stairs, out of the bars, and into the dining room. They sit at their tables, and then the lights are dimmed. Suddenly "folkloristic troupes" appear, dressed in embroidered fustans, and break into dance. The tourists put down their silverware and watch the dancers. The strollers lean forward and watch the tourists. Egyptians watching foreigners watching Egyptians dance.

What if the strollers burst into dance? I ask myself. What then?

In the meanwhile the steamers help to keep Egypt's economy afloat. But it would take only one well-aimed blow to push it under — something that would at one stroke send large numbers of Egyptian workers back from the Gulf, put a stop to tourism, and halt the flow of ships through the Suez Canal: something just like the invasion of Kuwait, for example.

Of course, then there would be an increase in Western aid. The $7 billion debt for armaments might be canceled (as it has been). There would be no need for an economy anymore. The fantasies of military strength would become real. The whole country would be a weapon, supported by the world outside. Just like Iraq was, for so many years.

3

Fawzia was standing at the door of the new house; she saw me as I turned the corner. "Nabeel's not back yet, ya Amitab," she said the moment she saw me. "He's still over there, in Iraq, and here we are sitting here and waiting."

"Have you had any news from him? A letter?"

"No, nothing," she said, leading me into their house. "Nothing at all. The last time we had news of him was when Ismail came back two months ago."

"Ismail's back?"

"Praise be to God." She smiled. "He's back in good health and everything."

"Where is he?" I said, looking around. "Can you send for him?"

"Of course," she said. "He's just around the corner, sitting at home. He hasn't found a job yet — does odd jobs here and there, but most of the time he has nothing to do. I'll send for him right now."

I looked around while I waited. Something seemed to have interrupted the work on their house. When I'd last seen it, I had had the impression that it would be completed in a matter of months. But now, a year and a half later, the floor was still just a platform of packed earth and gravel. The tiles had not been laid yet, and nor had the walls been plastered or painted.

"Hamdulillah al-salama." Ismail was at the door, laughing, his hand extended. "Why didn't you come?" he said as soon as the greetings were over. "You remember that day you telephoned from America? Nabeel telephoned me soon after he'd spoken to you. He just picked up the phone and called me where I was working. He told me that you'd said that you were going to visit us. We expected you for a long time. We made space in our room and thought of all the places we'd show you. But you know, Nabeel's boss, the shop owner? He got really upset — he didn't like it a bit that Nabeel had got a long-distance call from America."

"Why didn't Nabeel come back with you? What news of him?"

"He wanted to come back. In fact, he had thought that he would. But then he decided to stay for a few more months, make a little more money, so that they could finish building this house. You see how it's still half finished — all the money was used up. Prices have gone up this last year, everything costs more."

"And besides," said Fawzia, "what would Nabeel do back here? Look at Ismail — just sitting at home, no job, nothing to do…"

Ismail shrugged. "But still, he wanted to come back. He's been there three years. It's more than most, and it's aged him. You'd see what I mean if you saw him. He looks much older. Life's not easy out there."

"What do you mean?"

"The Iraqis, you know." He pulled a face. "They're wild — all those years of war have made them a little like animals. They come back from the army for a few days at a time, and they go wild, fighting on the streets, drinking. Egyptians never go out on the streets there at night. If some drunken Iraqis came across you, they would kill you, just like that, and nobody would even know, for they'd throw away your papers. It's happened, happens all the time. They blame us, you see. They say, 'You've taken our jobs and our money and grown rich while we're fighting and dying.'"

"What about Saddam Hussein?"

"Saddam Hussein!" He rolled his eyes. "You have to be careful when you breathe that name out there — there are spies everywhere, at every corner, listening. One word about Saddam and you're gone, dead. In those ways it's terrible out there, though of course there's the money. But still, you can't live long out there, it's impossible. Did you hear what happened during the World Cup?"

Earlier in the year Egypt had played a soccer match with Algeria, to decide which team would play in the World Cup. Egypt had won, and Egyptians everywhere had gone wild with joy. In Iraq the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who lived packed together, all of them young, all of them male, with no families, children, wives, nothing to do but stare at their newly bought television sets — they had exploded out of their rooms and into the streets in a delirium of joy. Their football team had restored to them that self-respect that their cassette recorders and television sets had somehow failed to bring. To the Iraqis, who have never had anything like a normal political life, probably never seen crowds except at pilgrimages, the massed ranks of Egyptians must have seemed like the coming of Armageddon. They responded by attacking them on the streets, often with firearms. Well trained in war, they fell upon the jubilant unarmed crowds of Egyptian workers.

"You can't imagine what it was like," said Ismail. He had tears in his eyes. "It was then that I decided to leave. Nabeel decided to leave as well, but of course he always needed to think a long time about everything. At the last minute he thought he'd stay just a little bit longer…"

A little later we went to his house to watch the news on the color television he had brought back with him. It sat perched on its packing case in the center of the room, gleaming new, with chickens roosting on a nest of straw beside it. Soon the news started and we saw footage from Jordan: thousands and thousands of men, some in trousers, some in jallabeyyas, some carrying their television sets on their backs, some crying out for a drink of water, stretching all the way from the horizon to the Red Sea, standing on the beach as though waiting for the water to part.

There were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the television set, watching carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. But there was nothing to be seen except crowds. Nabeel had vanished into the pages of the epic exodus.