The Philistine by Leila Marshy

Author:Leila Marshy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

horus the falcon-headed man

“Let me see your passport, ya hagga.” Manal held out her hand, a playful look on her face, and flipped through the pages. “You see? You only have a few days left. I knew, I knew. Why you do not keep track? They could expel you if you are not careful.”

“What are you talking about?” Nadia held it this way and that trying to decipher the stamp. “I can’t read it. And look here, it’s smudged.”

“Tssk.” Manal sounded disgusted, but her smile remained. “I take you. You want to see the worst of Cairo? Are you curious? We go to the Mogamma. Today, yanni.”

When it was built, shortly after World War II, the Mogamma government building was considered modern. Hulking and brutal, its concave walls embraced the hub of a new downtown in the new cosmopolitan city in an ambitious post-British-occupied Egypt. But it was all moving so fast. King Farouk had barely renamed the streets when Nasser’s handsome army claimed the country for themselves and Tahrir Square was born. The illiterate fellaheen, once kept busy in kitchens and fields, could now graduate with degrees in accounting or dentistry or education. General Nasser guaranteed them a job for life, if not in the hoped-for economy then in the growing public service. This explained why, on the day that Manal brought Nadia to officially extend her stay in Egypt, upwards of 10,000 people were stationed at their desks throughout the monolith’s fourteen floors.

“Bring enough money.” Manal did a quick calculation: thirty LE, Egyptian pounds, for the visa, ten LE for copies, five LE for the photograph, and another twenty just in case. “You never know what kind of day they are having,” Manal explained.

Set back from the road only a few hundred metres from the Nile Hilton, the front of the building was silhouetted by a tableau of thin men perched on cloth-covered crates banging away at typewriters, interspersed with other men, just as thin, waiting by tripoded box cameras whose black curtains hung limp in the breezeless air. Dotted between them, children, thinnest-of-all, sold envelopes from cloth sacks that dangled only inches off the ground.

“Yalla, this way.” Taking Nadia by the elbow, Manal pushed them up three flights of stairs; this way through a dozen offices where men and women sat lifeless, dusty manila envelopes piled in front of them; this way, into a crowded room where grey clods of people careened against a counter, waving passbooks and money; this way, through to another room, empty but for a handful of blond people. “Law samahti, taht umri, min fadlak,” Manal sang a string of honorifics and platitudes as she placed Nadia’s papers into the hands of a large and blinking woman who licked a stamp and placed it on a new set of papers and handed them back.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” Nadia said.

“Not yet.”

Manal dragged her back outside and positioned her in front of one of the cameras. They fanned themselves with Nadia’s documents as the photographer bent over a chemical bath that was as toxic as it was efficient.

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