“You know,” X remarks on our first evening, à propos of nothing in particular. “I think the person I am in love with is autistic.”

“REALLY?!” I say.

“Do you know much about autism?” he asks.

I love a good dysfunctional relationship story as much as the next person, and very probably more, and, further, my brother lives with Aspergers Syndrome, so I’m familiar with the spectrum. “This calls for wine!” I exclaim.

I can’t think of many autistic – or even aspy – people who’d cope well with the social and environmental rigours of Amsterdam’s gay bars.

Established on X’s local canal, with a bottle of rosé, two glasses and endless cyclists and even the odd canal boat drifting past, conversation turns to autism.

“What makes you think he’s autistic?” I ask.

“He’s very cold,” he says. “And when I see him, he’s often with this man, who I think is his carer.”

“His carer?!” I repeat. This throws me a little. “Where do you see him with his carer?”

“In the gay bars,” he says. “He lives not far from here.”

That sounds odd. I can’t think of many autistic – or even aspy – people who’d cope well with the social and environmental rigours of Amsterdam’s gay bars, especially not folk low-functioning enough to require a carer.

I take a meditative sip of pink wine, spark up a cigarette, and ponder. A light smattering of rain speckles the murky surface of the waters.

“They just say, ‘Oh you and your vague stories.’ That word is very Dutch, ‘vague’.”

“Let’s start from the beginning,” I say. “Where did you meet him?”

“In one of the gay bars,” he says. “He was wearing red trousers, and dancing really oddly. And he was kissing all these people.”

“Kissing?” I say. “That doesn’t sound very autistic to me. Most autistic people aren’t even comfortable with eye contact. Do you mean Aspergers, maybe?”

“Maybe,” he says. “But I think he is autistic. Because often he doesn’t seem to see me.”

A thought strikes me. “Have you actually slept with him?”

“No,” says X.

“Oh,” I say. “Have any of your friends met him? What do they think of him?”

“Oh,” he says. “They just say, ‘Oh you and your vague stories.’ That word is very Dutch, ‘vague’.”

“He was very rude to me. He came up to me and denied that there was anything between us.”

“Hmmm…” I say, watching the young teens gossiping by the bench, their whole lives stretching out ahead of them, so blissful, endless and free. “So when did you last see him?”

“In a gay bar,” he says. “During Pride. But he was very rude to me. He came up to me and denied that there was anything between us. He was yelling at me, telling me to go away, telling me to forget it, telling me there had never been anything between us.”

X replays this messy sketch with an obsessional word-for-word recall that somehow finds ambiguity and grounds for hope in this most – to the outsider – unambiguous of encounters.

“Oh dear,” I say, helplessly. “That doesn’t sound good. It doesn’t sound like he’s very good for you.”

“And then,” X explains. “I was outside his flat. He has a lover who comes to him once a week. I think it is a service.”

“No!” says X. “He’s in denial. Absolute denial.”

“I wonder,” I say diplomatically – for, as I say, I like X immensely – “Whether really this is more about you than him. Do you think he’d see himself as in a relationship with you?”

“No!” says X. “He’s in denial. Absolute denial.”

“Did you ever have a relationship like this before?” I ask.

“One time,” he says. “One time. He was my last other love. And,” he adds. “I got him! We went to bed, and then I had him, and then I walked away.”

“So after that,” I say. “You were free. You got him to bed, and then you were free to go.”

“Yes!” X says. “That’s exactly how it was.”

One way or the other, I hope he gets his closure.

Picture credit: Canals, Amsterdam by Lindsay Holmwood.

The post Our Genial Host appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Everest Base Camp the Lazy Way: Day 18

“Nir,” I open, tentatively. We are on the last-but-one night of our trek, insha’allah, sitting in the cold of the village of Phakding, where we stopped on our first day, so, if I’m going to ask Nir any personal questions, I’m going to ask them now. “How old were you when you got married?”

Nir giggles. “Fifteen,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. “And your wife?”

“Oh,” he says. “She was little! Eleven or twelve.”

“Eleven?!” I say, gulping internally. I know, of course, that child marriages are common in Nepal even today, and, at 29, Nir’s a veteran. Hell, at 29 he’s been a father almost as long as I’ve been a mother at 38, and working rather longer too, I imagine.

“Was it arranged by the families?” I ask.

Nir giggles again. This is, clearly, a bloody stupid question. Of course it wasn’t a love marriage, though it’s clear also, from the tone of their phone conversations – embarrassingly, after weeks in Nepal, I understand only a very few words of Nepali – that this child marriage is a love marriage now.

“And you’re happy?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “Very happy.”

We are now going into difficult territory and, looking back, I’m not quite sure why I do.

“And your own daughter?” I ask. She is nine years old, and he clearly loves her to bits – we’ve had conversations about eating more protein and fresh veggies to help her grow a little taller, because he’s worried that she’s too small. (Nir is bright enough and earning enough, as was the guy we met in Lombok, to make this advice practicable and meaningful.)

“The same,” he says.

“Eleven?” I say, shocked despite myself.

Maybe I’m mishearing.

I mean, Nir’s a smart guy. He works in the tourist trade. He’s collecting every single one of the English language books I wantonly, extravagantly buy and then discard to bring his English up to the level of his brother’s and become a fully fledged guy.

Surely he can’t be marrying his daughter off while she’s still a child?

“Twelve,” he says.

I’m still hoping we’re lost in translation. “So, she’ll marry when she’s twelve?” I say. “Your daughter will marry when she is twelve?”

“Yes,” Nir says. I look across at Zac. At twelve, he’s still very… well, as Nir described his own child bride, “little”.

“What about school?” I say (ironically, given my own son, of course, is in world school, not real school). I’m still kind of hoping that I’ve misunderstood, and asking a question that doesn’t allow the answer ‘yes’ is a good way to get through.

“Oh,” he says, and he looks a little sad at this point. “She’ll go to school.”

“Will you pay the school fees or will the husband pay?” I ask. (School fees are around 500 rupees ($5.50) per child, per month, or, annualised, almost 15% of the per capita average income — an unimaginable sum for the many, many Nepalis who live on less than $200 a year.)

I’m not quite sure at what point child brides and teen husbands are expected to behave fully as husband and wife, though I’d imagine there’s more enthusiasm from the fifteen-year-old husband than the eleven-year-old bride, and I don’t really want to go there. I don’t, really, want to be here, even.

“I pay,” Nir says.

“Even after they marry?” I ask.

He laughs. Yes, then too. Even after the dowry – goats, apparently — he’ll still be paying the school fees. It’s not like the Sherpa guy who runs our lodge, putting his two daughters through university in the States, but, I guess, for a Newari peasant farmer, it’s a step. A big step.

Like the Bedouin girl we met in the Sinai, Nir’s little girl is being educated. Aged nine, she’s already among the 57% of Nepalese girls and women who can read and write. It’s progress. HUGE progress.

But… such, such a long way to go.

Zac pipes up, “But she’s too young! You can’t…”

I hush him. I wouldn’t, normally. He’s talked about religion with Islamists, politics with diplomats, nuclear fusion with a nuclear physicist – it’s one of the ways he learns as we ricochet around the globe.

But here, I don’t want him to have his say, and I don’t want to say my piece either, because it is not our place.

And this is why…

The custom of child marriage is alien to me. In my moral universe, it’s simply and uncomplicatedly a bad thing, especially for girls, who are forced into motherhood before they are even biologically, let alone emotionally, ready to withstand it.

But…

My own way of life – as a single mother, with multiple partners over her life, who gives out her phone number to strange men she meets on the mountains, is, I would wager, every bit as simply and uncomplicatedly a bad thing to Nir as his willingness to marry off his very young daughter is to me.

Nir has said nothing to me.

I mean, of course he hasn’t. I’m his employer and on any outsider assessment a frank discussion of what he thinks of my sexual morals is unlikely to increase his tip.

I suspect, in fact, that he has asked me very little about my life, other than the whereabouts of my husband (whom I, as usual, have conflated with Zac’s dad and placed in Australia, working, just because it’s easier than explaining the whole shebang), because he knows that he is unlikely to like what he hears and that I am unlikely to like the questions.

And now I have opened this whole can of worms, and I really want it closed.

Zac, however, is horrified. He is twelve himself, and still very much a little boy. “TWELVE?” he says. “That’s way too young.”

“Sweetheart,” I say. “Leave it.”

But, try as I might to move onto other topics, I can’t quite get the child marriage thing out of my head. I don’t want it to change my view of Nir, whom I like immensely, and who’s been an excellent guide.

But it does. It shouldn’t do. But it does.

I’m still incredibly fond of Nir, but there’s a barrier there.

And it’s my fault for putting it up.

We pootle up to Lukla in the morning, to confirm our flights, and, after one night in Lukla, we are through.

This trek, I feel, this wonderful adventure that will stay with me for the rest of my life, is over.

Zac and I have enjoyed a running gag about how high we rank on what he calls the Foul Bachelor Scale, but I have had enough of being foul.

I want to get back to Kathmandu, do our laundry, clear a backlog of work, crystallise some of the stuff that Zac has learnt, see the hawt soldier (in the unlikely event he doesn’t find a better offer up a mountain), sort our China visa, get down to Chitwan to see some rhino over Christmas, do our Christmas shopping, then head to Beijing for New Year.

I also want a Negroni, a blue steak, a green salad with vinaigrette dressing, an English breakfast with crispy bacon and a winter frock, tights and kneeboots that I can wear to the five-star hotel which will undoubtedly serve the aforementioned Negroni (or even — I am yoyoing wildly between fourteen and forty at the moment, ages which have more in common than you would think — a night out in hopefully extremely dim lighting with the age-inappropriate soldier).

And the fact that I’m posting about the run-up to Christmas in January should tell you exactly how well all that went.

You can read the last post in this series on our Everest Base Camp trek here, or start from the beginning here. Or just click next to find out what happened next…

If you’re thinking of doing the Everest Base Camp trek, I recommend my Everest Base Camp FAQs.

The post On Thin Ice – Talking Child Marriage in Nepal appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

There’s that mild anxiety. Will we have things to talk about? Will the conversation flow?

The more neurotic worries… Will we even recognise each other? (Umm, yes, obviously.)

And, of course, the age factor…

Guys, I’m told, look at the hair. In particular, how much of it remains. Then at the gut.

For me, it’s all about the lines. Not really about the weight.

And it wasn’t, a few years back. I remember meeting up with a friend in the early part of the century, when we hadn’t seen each other for the big end of a decade.

All I remember thinking is, “I wonder what K looks like now?” It didn’t particularly occur to me that she could have sprouted wrinkles, turned grey, or become obese.

Now, of course, it’s all about the ageing process, and such unfortunate transformations are, if not yet to be predicted, at least of exponentially increasing likelihood.

Oh, and kids too.

Kids, needless to say, are one of the plus points of getting older.

Miki last saw Zac at our friends’ wedding in the south of France shortly before 9/11, and found him the cutest baby ever. And now she has a daughter of her own, who’s rising five.

Both Zac and I are very much looking forward to meeting her when she’s back from the grandparents.

“So,” says Zac, with the air of one delivering a rapier thrust of wit, as we loiter under the lemon trees in the courtyard of the dance centre, and he endeavours to make his Magnum last a lifetime. “Last time you went to a modern dance performance, did the Soviet Union still exist?”

“Ummm….” I say.

I know, of course, that I have been to a modern dance performance. But I certainly haven’t been to one for a while.

“After,” I say. “Definitely after. The Soviet Union fell in 1991. I was seventeen then. Though did I ever tell you that when the Berlin Wall came down I was convinced there was going to be a nuclear war?”

“Yes,” he says, and I realise why I have no idea where my parents were when Kennedy was shot. It’s because at any time they might have told me this, I would have been beyond uninterested.

“Yeah,” I say. “But it’ll be great.”

I hope it will.

Hell, I used to go to Tel Aviv to party. (When it comes to hedonism, it’s one of the Middle East’s more savage ironies that Tel Aviv and Beirut – still technically at war – form a dead heat for most fun cities in the region.)

Now, they don’t just call Tel Aviv the new Miami for the Bauhaus. Or the beaches, that curve right along the city. And, while I know Tel Aviv has a lot more to offer than nightclubs – which were, obviously, much better in the old days (an opinion, I would guess, that has been voiced by older generations since the days when nightlife consisted of reels, gavottes and foxy lutenists) – I’m generally intrigued to see how it plays with a child in tow and narcotics and other excess firmly off the menu.

Exhibit one. The modern dance.

We enter, settle down, and as two guys engage in a prolonged feat of what I shouldn’t call rope play, I sneak a look at Zac. He seems 100% focused. And engaged. Result!

Miki’s waiting for us in the courtyard, and I recognise her instantly. She doesn’t seem to have changed.

Nor, for that matter, does she seem to have aged. Which is a little unfair.

Me?

“Yeah,” she says. “You look like a woman, not a girl. But you’re looking good.”

The last time I was in Tel Aviv with Miki, I could a) fit into and b) look good in head to toe Thierry Mugler PVC (UK size 8!).

Well, at least I think I looked good. And Miki, who was a stylist at the time, put me in it, so I must have done. Right?

Right????

Ummm…

Boy, that was a long time ago… Now I have to wear a top that drapes over my skinny jeans to camouflage the muffin top and emphasise what passes for my breasts.

AKA, looking like a woman, rather than a girl.

AKA, 2 clothes sizes larger, and probably 3 clothes sizes larger around the tummy.

We talk about the dance as we wait for the dancers to come out, and Zac compliments Miki on the costumes she did for the show, before scampering, randomly, around the courtyard.

“Yeah,” says Miki. “I’ve taken Rio to it, too. It’s OK for kids.”

“Even the S&M?” I say.

“Yeah,” she laughs. “It’s like S&M for five year olds.”

“What’s S&M?” asks Zac, desisting for a second from bowling with the citrus he’s kidnapped from the trees.

“Sado-masochism,” I say.

“Ohhhhhh….” he says, eyes widening with illumination. “The DOG COLLARS!”

Miki laughs. I wonder what Zac’s been looking at on the internet…

We go for beer (me) and mint lemonade (Zac) with one of the dancers in Florentine, a neighbourhood of bright graffiti, post-industrial alleys, hipster bars and local eateries that reminds me of how Shoreditch used to be a decade ago. A couple of musicians show up and play Turkish instruments. There are a lot of very beautiful girls. It’s fun.

By 1am, I’m tired. Twelve years ago, I’d barely have been getting started…

So, I don’t resist Zac when he decides it’s time to go.

“Hmmm…” says Zac, as we cab it back to our flat. “Tel Aviv really is a very cool city, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” I say.

I am super-pleased Zac likes Tel Aviv. It’s a place where you can see Picasso, Da Vinci, Renoir, Seurat, Monet, Manet, Rothko, Liechtenstein and more in the morning, then amble to the beach and splash in the Med; club till dawn then eat world-beating hummus in Jaffa Old Town; chow down on sashimi or catch up on opera. It’s thoroughly metropolitan. But with real, functional beach.

Further, I’m pleased my son has taste.

But, me being me, we only have three days in which to experience all of this: we need to meet friends in Turkey within a few days, and having too much fun in Dahab has seriously slashed our time in Israel.

“Mum,” says Zac, when I explain this to him. “You are a fucktard.”

The post Old Friends and Dog Collars appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

“No, you don’t,” I say. “This place does both!”

We’ve been randoming around downtown Jerusalem, a place, at least in the wealthy Jewish West, that’s not short on gelato parlours (apart from anything else, it allows the kosher restaurants to keep dairy desserts off their menu, vastly simplifying their washing up in a world where meat and milk must never mix).

“Ooh,” says Zac, again, pondering, with the ultra-focused attention only a child can devote to ice cream. “I think I’ll just have gelato.”

“You could have both,” I say, my spoilt brat greed surging to the fore.

Who wouldn’t want both?

“No,” he says. “Just gelato.”

There’s something up in the parlour when we enter and we, both of us, stand aside so as not to interrupt. A pretty young girl, tanned, hair neat in a pony tail over her army uniform, smiling and laughing, two mufti friends in tow, and a man in his 40s behind the counter, tense, grey-haired.

They see us. The girl leaves, still laughing, and the grey-haired chap behind the counter begins to shake.

Zac moves over to the refrigerator, starts poring over the Hebrew characters and pictures. “Wow, Mum!” he says. “It’s a good thing they’ve got pictures! Coconut. Pistachio. Rum and raisin…”

He’s spelling them out, working over them, 100% focused with the sort of concentration that I know will be gone within a year or two in search of things that feel more adult and more permanent.

And I start to smile. And I catch the gelato man’s eye. And he’s smiling too. At this still quite little boy, who won’t be little much longer, so painstakingly picking out an ice cream.

“Ooh,” says Zac. “Rum and RAISIN.”

“Would you like to buy?” I hear the man say.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. When it comes to food, Zac’s decision making powers would age Methuselah. We could, quite literally, be here all night. “He’ll buy. He’s just deciding. It takes a while.”

“No,” he says. “To try?”

He holds out a little plastic scoop of rum and raisin. Zac refuses at first, then accepts and pronounces it good.

The gelato man is still shaking. He’s smiling, but he’s shaking. His hand is juddering like an alcoholic’s at 9am.

Zac tries the scoop of icecream, pronounces it good, begins a leisurely inspection of the sauces and trimmings that line the other side.

“Do you have caramel?” he asks.

A blank look. “CARAMEL?”

A little pot comes out, and in goes the sauce for testing. Zac rolls it around his mouth, takes another scoop, and finds it good.

The gelato man is happy that Zac finds it good.

“Your daughter?” I ask, nodding in the direction of the vanished warrior, who must be all of nineteen at the most, but seems, to my untutored eye, to be dressed for combat.

“Yes,” he says, smiling and shaking. We’re in that weird communality of parenthood that hits at the most surprising moments, that sense of common humanity, that feeling that we understand each other, no matter what, we have that one thing in common.

“How many?” I ask. “Only one?”

“No,” he laughs. “Four.”

He mimes three, then one. His youngest.

“Oh,” I say. “Three safe now. This one to go.”

“Yes,” he says. He’s still shaking. Big, proud smile. Eyes that are about to cry.

“How many years?” I ask.

“Two,” he says, shaking more.

She’s only just begun. Two years to safety. Two years till she comes back home.

Or doesn’t.

“Cone or tub?” he asks Zac.

“A tub, please,” says Zac.

“How many scoops?”

“Just one.”

“Are you SURE?” I interject. “You can have as many as you want, as many flavours as you want.”

“No,” he says. “I just want one scoop, rum and raisin, with caramel sauce.”

The man scoops out one scoop, then fills the little tub with its strawberry print up to and beyond the brim. I count three scoops.

Zac’s eyes are almost popping out of his head. “Thank you!” he says.

We talk a little bit about London, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, how the city has changed since I was last here. I pay my twelve shekels, then we progress outside with the sacrificial ice cream to eat it on the pavement in the night breeze that’s just starting to shatter the heat of a day punctuated by the gunfire rattle of pre-Ramadan firecrackers.

As we head back towards the Old City, and the swelter of our cramped room in its Ottoman building, I say to Zac, “He was a nice man, wasn’t he? He was really nice to you.”

“Yeah,” says Zac. “Probably because of his daughter. He was thinking about his daughter the whole time he was offering me the ice cream. That’s why he was being so nice to me.”

No flies on you, son, I think.

“Yes,” I say. “I thought that too.”

“I think it’s good that they have women in the army here,” Zac says. “I know they only have to do two years, not three. But I think it’s very equal. Not as equal as it could be, but very equal.”

It’s Thursday night, the Friday night of the Middle East, and the streets are full of Haredim, the ultra-orthodox Jews whose children, boys and girls, alone among Jewish Israelis, are still (currently) excused the army.

So most vote as aggressively as they can in every single instance: more settlements, more war, push the dirty Arabs into the sea, no compromise, no second state in Eretz-Yisrael, no more polluting Zion with this filth…

“It is,” I say. “It’s very equal.”

For this is the first time, I think, I have witnessed a father waving off his daughter: normally it’s mothers waving off their sons.

Now, I’m not saying the fight she’s fighting is right. Lord knows I’m not.

We’ll visit Palestinian camps while we’re here, and there’ll be warriors and parents there too. Male warriors. Male martyrs. Grieving mothers. And perhaps some female martyrs too.

Ordinary mothers, fathers, children, routinely humiliated and turned over, by bold, brave, young fighters such as her, immortals who, in their own minds at least, death will never touch. Until it does.

Because, like everything in the Middle East, and especially in Jerusalem, this ancient city, this holy city, this city of crazed and bleeding mirrors, there is no right. There are only, ever, different shades of wrong.

The ice cream, Zac tells me, was great.

The post Gelato in Jerusalem appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

So, of course, did Z.

Until he got there, obviously.

“WOW!” says Z. “Banana boats! I totally want to do that! And, OH MY GOD, what’s this?!”

“No,” I say, on reflex, eyeing the entirely passive inflatables my son is clearly targeting in lieu of wholesome, improving, educational windsurfing, and then feel guilty.

“I’ll make you a good deal,” says the guy with the plastic crap. “Cigarette?”

“Just had one,” I say. He’s got both our numbers, down pat. “But, thank you.”

Z scales a small pile of inflatables and brings them crashing to the ground. “This looks amazing!” he says. “Look, Mum! It’s a two man tube and they tow it behind the speedboat. We HAVE to do this….”

“No,” I say. I’m feeling fragile, and being chucked out of a giant rubber ring at 40mph into 26 degree water is not my idea of fun at this point in time.

“10 Euros for ten minutes,” says the guy. “But for you, I’ll do 60 Egyptian.”

Oh god, I think…

I’ve only just got my son back, I’ve got a shedload of work on, and now I’m refusing to spend a measly six squid on tubing behind a speedboat?!

“Why don’t we come back with L?” I say (Z has acquired a friend of his sort of age, plus a bike with which to visit him). “Then you can do it with him!”

“Why don’t the two of us do it now, and then do it AGAIN with L?” Z counters.

“Because….” I begin weakly…

By the time we get back to the only windsurfing place that didn’t want the price of TWO (count’em) dives for an hour on a windsurfing board with an instructor, they’re about to shut.

“Anyway,” the chap says. “There’s no wind.”

“No wind?” I say, eyeing the millpond sea. “I thought that was a GOOD thing with a junior learning. As in, he’d actually be able to lift the sail up.”

“You need SOME wind,” the chap explains, speaking VERY slowly and VERY carefully. “Because without any wind, even if he gets everything right, he won’t actually go anywhere. You need the wind,” he amplifies, “To move the board.”

Never fear. There is a ball. There are a couple of Bedouin kids.

And, within seconds, Z is playing with the ball and the kids in the water.

Eyeing the bikini-clad women on this resort beach, I figure it is safe not only to get into the water but – oh gentle reader, forgive me for I have spent too long in Lebanon – to remove my singlet, if not my shorts, and actually wear a bikini in Egypt.

They’re young kids, which, given Z has inherited my hand-eye coordination, is no bad thing, and he’s placing the ball nicely for them and being very tolerant when they misthrow.

It’s all terribly sweet and intercultural and all that. I throw the ball with them for a bit. The bikini top seems to be fine.

And so, gentle reader, I figure I’ll go for a little swim …

Not a very satisfactory swim, since the beach shelves so gently – what is it with these resort beaches? Did someone do a survey that proved tourists prefer wading to swimming? — that you have to walk out about half a mile to swim.

So, not exactly a swim…

But I can do that thing they do in all the tourist brochures! Wear a bikini! Go into the sea! Stand there admiring the mountains and the landscape, and have a little dip.

Maybe I’ll even look like one of the women in the brochures!

Well, yeah, I’ll keep my shorts on, but maybe tomorrow I could actually wear only a bikini?! The other girls seem to be doing just fine and my stomach sorely needs some sun.

“Bonjour, madame,” says a rather portly gentleman, whose position in the water indicates he is responsible for the kids. “Ça va bien?”

“Bonjour,” I say, unleashing my best Franglais, while vaguely mystified as to why anyone who speaks French even worse than I do would choose this language to address me, and wondering where on earth he could be from. “Ça va bien, merci! Comment allez-vous?”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I LOVE speaking “French”. I speak “French” at every opportunity, much to the embarrassment of my spawn, and I’ve been very much enjoying speaking drunk “French” in Lebanon.

I find alcohol vastly improves my capacity with foreign languages, though, of course, my interlocutors may differ. My drunk “Chinese” held up for an entire conversation with a Japanese guy in a bar in Shanghai, and, with the aid of a dictionary, I have discussed philosophical concepts in drunk “Indonesian”.

Anywise, my capacity with the French language was best summed up by a Moroccan, 20 years or so ago, who laughed at some incoherent, impoverished, ungrammatical bon mot of mine and then said, “You know, you’d really be quite funny if you could speak French…”

“I am an teacher of French at a French high school meeleetairy,” says my new friend, who I am beginning to realise may not be the owner of the kids at all. Bugger.

I am now standing up, in the bikini top I bought in Beirut. That is, while not an atypical amount of flesh for a foreign woman on this beach, still a hell of a lot of exposed flesh given the water is only waist-high and we are, after all, in Egypt.

Wait?! WHAT?!

“Where did you learn French?” I ask, in French.

“No, no,” he says. “I am an TEACHER of French, at a meeleetairy high school.”

“Yes,” I say. I mean, I knew the Egyptian education system was blasted, and teachers earn pennies, but this man does not appear poor. “I know! Where did you study French?”

“I have stoodehed in the Rouen. And I have veeseeted the Paris,” he says. “Have you ever veeseeted the Paris, madame?”

Holy shit! I’m in a GCSE French conversation exam circa 1990, except wearing only a bikini top and shorts. I am LIVING an anxiety dream.

“Yes,” I say. “Several times. Maybe four or five? I can’t remember how many times. I need to think…”

What I am thinking about is what excuse I can use to extract myself from this conversation. I could go for a swim, but in waist-high water it’s kind of pointless and anyway, I’ll probably have to continue our French conversation while swimming with my new friend.

“I am here inspecting the teaching of French in high schools,” he says. “With my colleague.”

He’s moving in.

Oh god.

He’s going to touch my arm.

“Are you married?” he asks, looking at my left hand (and, yet again, I perceive the bitter, bitter irony that, after the fake wedding ring I donned for my last sustained trip in this neck of the woods was so blithely disbelieved, now every man I meet is looking for the ring and finding it wanting).

“No,” I say. “Not any more. But I have a boyfriend.”

“What’s his name?”

He touches my arm.

The only name that springs to mind is Z’s dad’s. I spit it out, hope Z can’t hear me, and look around for someone to extract me from this conversation.

My son is happily playing ball with the little kids. Bugger.

I was soooo looking forward to a beer at the beach bar, as well.

Bugger, bugger, bugger.

“You speak the French extremely well,” he says. “You are verrrry pretty and verrrry polite.”

I try to steer the topic into safer, umm, waters. “The two little boys,” I say. “Are they your sons?”

“No, no,” he says. “They are enemy.”

“WHAT?” I say.

“ENEMY,” he says.

“Enemy?” I repeat weakly.

“Yes, they are of UNE AMIE,” he says.

Oh, I think. Well, at least he has a female friend. Somewhere.

Where?

“How old are they?” I ask.

“BOY!” he yells in Arabic. “HOW OLD ARE YOU?”

“Eight,” replies the first kid, in Arabic.

“He is eight,” he tells me, in French.

“BOY!” he bellows in Arabic. “HOW OLD’S THE OTHER BOY?”

“Five,” the answer comes back. They’re definitely Bedouin, cos the five-year-old looks seven, and I reckon the eight-year-old is nine.

“The other is five,” he says.

“Oh,” I say, finding this interaction mildly amusing. “What are their names?”

Now, I should say that my new friend is not ungentlemanly (apart from the arm touch), just extremely persistent, but it is quite clear that solo, mother and son, or mother and group of kids activities are now firmly off the agenda for the evening.

I wander over and throw the ball with the kids.

He joins in.

Of course he bloody does.

They’re his friend’s kids, right?

F*ck OFF, I think. You don’t even KNOW these kids.

I want to get out of here before he starts befriending my son.

I crouch down to a shoulder and cleavage concealing depth, and half-wade, half-swim over to Z. “We need to leave,” I mutter.

“Why?” he says.

“That guy’s hitting on me,” I say. “I KNEW I shouldn’t have worn a bikini.”

“Oh,” he says. “Alright, then.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I just can’t shake him.”

“That’s alright,” Z says. My new friend is of an age and, let’s be honest, size that does not, I think, suit Z’s mental ideal of a suitor for his mother.

“I’m sorry,” I lie in Franglais. “We have to go! Our driver is waiting for us, and we are meeting friends.”

We are midway through this hasty exit and our driver is coming to meet us when Z’s face collapses into utter trauma.

“Mum!” he says. “You DO have my sandals, don’t you?”

The post French Conversation appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

This is Anoud, 2, with her great-grandfather, Mohammed, 93, looking at a picture of him in his British Army uniform from World War II.

They live with our guide Shadi and 20-or so other relatives in one of the villages to which the Jordanian government moved the Bedouin of Petra.

Anoud is a happy little soul, and hugely loved by all her large family. Society has changed beyond all imagining in Mohammed’s lifetime, and I wonder whether, when Atoul becomes a woman, her horizons will be broader than the Bedouin girl we met in Sinai.

The post The Friday Photo: Bedouin Girl appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I is in her late 40s, early 50s, and, after a week or more of the Cairo streets, I don’t immediately read her as Egyptian, despite the fact she’s speaking Arabic. It’s because of what she’s wearing, you see.

“You know,” she says to Z. “They have ducks and rabbits in the orchard?”

We talk for a while.

“May I ask you something?” I say. She assents. “You’re Egyptian, right? Would you wear what you are wearing in Cairo?”

I’s outfit is hardly risque by Western standards. She’s wearing a white camisole with a white sleeveless waistcoat over the top, and a white skirt, fitted and flared, that comes down to mid-calf.

But hers are the first female Egyptian upper arms or calves that I have seen, and there is a glimpse of shoulder too.

“I have a car,” I says, which, coming from a woman who has the money to stay in a 60-euro a night hotel, means she also has a driver. “I don’t walk on the streets or use public transport. But, you know, this is something since the revolution. Cairo has always been…”

“I know in the 70s women could wear miniskirts in Cairo,” I say, recalling a conversation with an educated, liberal Cairene in his early 20s, retrospectively amazed by the flesh on display in family photos from before he was born. “And bikinis on the Red Sea Coast…”

In the 1950s, in fact, Cairo was considered one of the world’s stylish cities, a liberal, sophisticated capital of elegance and beauty, up there with Rome and Paris. “Yes,” she says. “But you… Now, I’m a Muslim. But for a moment I thought you were one, or married to one. You don’t need to wear all that here.”

“Yeah,” I say, losing the headscarf I have unwillingly adopted. I’ve been wearing trousers, a loose long-sleeved top layered over a shorter one and a scarf around my neck and shoulders throughout our time in Cairo.

But since covering hair for modesty has not been part of our culture for more than a century, I find the headscarf a difficult thing to wear and, further, a political act. I don’t like to wear a headscarf unless I’m in a country, such as Mauritania, where every single woman wears one.

My last ditch reserve for coping with the dual onslaught of tourist harassment and sexual harassment one faces as a visibly foreign woman in Egypt was to don a correctly-tied headscarf and invest in a wedding ring, with the aim of looking exactly what I initially read me as, a Western convert with a Muslim husband.

“You see, there was this man on the bus…” I say.

Now, I’m a big fan of public transport as a way to get around a country while seeing more of it than you would from the inside of a backpacker bus or private car, and, in fact, from the intelligent, sparky and fully covered women I met on the ferry in Aswan through to the nice chap who helped us out on the bus from Dahab, this has generally worked pretty well in Egypt.

Not in this instance, however.

He’s a rat-like little man in his 30s, I would guess, who begins his harassment by leaning across his seat to stare concentratedly across the aisle, straight into my face. I cope by putting down the large sunglasses which, like most uncovered women in Egypt, I wear more for protection against stares than against the sun.

Then he begins to look at me and suck his finger obscenely. “WHAT?” I say, loudly. This deters him for a while and I return to my book. Then there’s a tugging motion on my peripheral vision.

I sit, for a bit, my son asleep besides me, endeavouring to ignore this and focus on my book, until I’m too cross to concentrate.

F*ck this, I think. I’m b*ggered if I’m spending three hours on a bus trying to ignore the masturbator across the aisle.

I get up, and begin to storm down the bus, before realising I don’t speak enough Arabic to complain to the driver. There is one other woman on the bus, with her husband, down the far end, but I’ve identified a man in front of me as a potential defender should things turn nasty.

I turn to the masturbator. He zips up.

“You are a DISGUSTING man,” I say in my best headteacher voice. Everyone on the bus starts awake and begins to stare.

He puts his hands up defensively.

“You call yourself a Muslim? Is this ISLAM?” I say, getting into my stride. “How would you feel if someone did that to your MOTHER? To your SISTER?”

He begins to slink down the bus. “You are a DISGUSTING man,” I say, again. “No Muslim!”

“What’s the matter?” says the guy in front of me.

“Oh,” I say, and mime the offending sequence of activities, then start to grin with relief. “No problem. All sorted.”

He shrugs, sympathetic but, it appears, unsurprised, and goes back to sleep.

“What was that, Mum?” says Z.

“Oh, just some disgusting man masturbating,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

“He looked really scared, Mum,” says Z. “I think he thought you were going to hit him.”

“So,” I say to I, by way of summary. “I’d been wearing a scarf around my neck and shoulders for Cairo, and at this point I decided I’d put it over my hair. Because Nubia is conservative.”

“You see,” I says. “This is what they want you to do. They want you to be afraid so that you cover.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘afraid’,” I say.

Because I’m not afraid. I am just sick of the constant low-level harassment and occasional higher-level incident, and I don’t particularly want to explain another one to my tween boy. “But I see your point.”

“Since the Revolution, it has been really bad,” I states. “The Brotherhood, the Islamists, they are behind all this. They encourage it. The harassment of women on Tahrir Square. The easiest way to keep women covered and at home is to harass them on the streets, so this is what they do. But here, you don’t need to be afraid.”

It’s noticeable, to me, although I have only visited the Sinai before, how very much more conservative Egypt is than it was 10 years ago, when I last visited, or 15 years ago. A conservatism that, sadly, does not extend to perverts on the bus.

Because, here’s the thing… In the “permissive” West, I could march down the bus to the driver and insist that he call police and have the man arrested. In Egypt, he moves, but stays on the bus.

As it happens, I did once report a masturbator to the tourist police, in Lombok, Indonesia: he was in his teens, and I suggested to the policeman that he speak to the parents. The policeman’s opening question? “Where is your husband?”

“You know,” I says. “There is nothing about this in Islam? Nothing that says that women should be repressed.”

“Yes,” I say, citing the classic example of Mohammed’s first wife, an older woman who ran camel trains across Arabia and hired the young future Prophet as her manager before marrying him. “Khadija was a businesswoman. But we did this in Christianity, too. Jesus had Mary Magdalene among his disciples. We wrote her out of history, said only men could be priests. The patriarchy…”

Now, “patriarchy” is not a word that I have used in a while. But Egypt does this to you.

In Cairo, an academic in his 60s, a delightful, liberal man, married to a feminist academic, asked me whether I was a feminist. This gave me pause for thought. Because I am, of course, but, most of the time, in England, I don’t need to think about whether I am or not. Our battles are, largely, already won.

“The problem,” I says. “Is that we in Egypt are where you guys were in the Middle Ages when it comes to religion.”

We wander off to meet the ducks and baby rabbits, and I shows us the organic tomatoes and aubergines growing in the shade of the orchard.

On I’s insistence, I change into a short-sleeved top. “There!” says I. “You can actually wear what you like here. You can wear shorts, if you want.”

Short sleeves, frankly, is enough for me at the moment, given that all the women I see on the streets are fully covered, a few even including their eyes, and I am trying to navigate the difficult zone between feminist values and respect for local culture.

“Are there many feminists in Egypt?” I ask, tentatively.

Egyptian feminists have been hugely visible in the Western media since the revolution, but women of any persuasion are a tiny minority on the streets, even on public transport, except for the Friday nights when you see them out with their families.

“Yes,” says I, definitively. Her daughter, who works for an NGO, nods assertively.

“I thought that there was a problem for feminism in Egypt, since the revolution,” I say. “I thought it was all very associated with Suzanne Mubarak.”

I’s daughter shakes her head more firmly. She’s a beautiful girl, wearing a full-length, loose T-shirt dress with a loose long-sleeved white cardigan over the top. “It wasn’t her,” she says. “She took credit for many, many people’s work. She did nothing.”

“What about outside the elite?” I ask, thinking of the Bedouin girl I met in Sinai, but then, also of our taxi driver’s ex-wife.

Among Egypt’s elite, the wealthy minority of educated, English-speaking intellectuals and businesspeople, feminism is relatively strong, although a two-career family remains unusual.

I want to find out about the working class.

“There is a woman who works for me. She comes to clean the house. She’s in her 20s, can’t read or write,” I says. In 2007, over 40% of Egyptian women were functionally illiterate.

“And she goes out to work while her husband stays at home, smoking.” I makes a gesture of intense disgust. “She pays him some money to look after their two children while she goes out to work.”

“Right,” I say.

“Now, she’s a feminist,” I says. “Because if the Muslim Brotherhood get their way, she won’t be able to work. And the family will have nothing to live on. And, even though she cannot read or write, she knows this.”

“So…” I am about to ask how she voted in the last election, but I forestalls me.

“She called me, during the election, because she can’t read, so she wanted to know which symbols, which pictures, she should put her mark by, so I told her,” I says. “And then, after, when she came to my house, she said, ‘Doctor I! I know that you can only vote twice, but I voted three times, because I did not want my vote to go to one of them.’ She spoiled her ballot paper, you see. As a protest…”

I’m not sure how functional a protest this is, nor whether, as a life goal, working to support a no-good husband rather than removing him from her life, is exactly feminist. But, I guess, by Egyptian standards, it is.

“Things will change for women now, after the revolution,” I says. “I’m optimistic. I believe we are coming to a new world. It has to change!”

“But,” I say. “75% of the population voted for the Islamists at the last election.”

“The Sunnis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, this is not Egypt!” I says. “This is coming out of Saudi Arabia! It is not Egyptian! It is not what Egypt is!”

I have talked in-depth with two Islamist men, neither of them the bearded, hatchet-faced stereotype, who consider Egypt the true heirs to the true Islam, and Saudi Arabia corrupt and decadent (you can read these conversations here and here).

This was in the Sinai, close to Saudi, within the sphere of influence of the powers who, Vanity Fair and others have argued, sponsored 9/11, but… Egypt is the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood, the home of radical Islam.

“And look what they have done!” I continues. “In three months of government they have done more damage to themselves than we could have done to them in years! Look at the gas crisis…”

There is a serious petrol crisis in Egypt at the moment, with queues stretching over a mile in each direction from every gas station. No one quite understands the roots of it, particularly since the nation continues to export fossil fuels.

I’ve heard explanations that run all the way from Mubarak-era loyalists dumping tankers of gasoline in the desert through to desperation for hard currency, through to interference by Israel/US/Saudi Arabia (delete according to political allegiance), through to a strategic move by the military junta, SCAF, to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood.

The result, in a very Egyptian fashion, is a vibrant black market in petrol, taxi drivers who open negotiations with Italian hand gestures and operatic wails of “MADAME! No benzine!” and, of course, yet more strain on a tanking economy with a government that cannot agree hard currency loans.

“And look at their candidate! Now, his mother is an American citizen, and he cannot stand.” (This birther controversy, after investigation, will prove to be untrue.) “They lie! They lie! They said they wouldn’t run a candidate for president. And now they do. Egyptians can SEE how much they lie.”

“But they dominate the Assembly,” I say. “And, not just that, they dominate the body that is writing the Constitution. Do you think the position of women will improve?”

“It has to,” says I. “It just has to. Because otherwise, we will need another revolution in three years time. And we will have wave, after wave, after wave of revolution until we’re free.”

“I hope so,” I say. “I really hope it does.”

More in this series:
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 1: The Coder
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 2: The Bedouin Girl
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 3: The Future Soldier
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 4: The Guide
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 5: The Businessman
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 6: The Taxi Driver

The post Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 7: The Working Mother appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

“I washed the car this morning,” A says, by way of explanation: cutting up other drivers is by the by on Cairo’s congested roads. “He’s made it dirty. I feel everything that happens to this car. I FEEL it.”

“Mm,” I say, noncommittally, recalling the unfortunate motorcyclist who clipped a wing mirror the other day.

Cairo is a city of road rage. And beneath A’s calm, pleasant exterior, his neat checked shirt, his belted flannels and leather shoes, there’s the simmering rage I feel a lot in this huge city’s streets: 17 million people living cheek by jowl, gridlock for five or six hours a day, and nowhere near enough money to go around.

There is godawful grinding poverty here in Cairo, shanty town, malnutrition poverty, low birthweight poverty, polio poverty. But what passes for a middle class in other countries are barely getting by too.

As A has told me, “On a teacher’s salary, you earn maybe 300 Egyptian pounds (fifty dollars) a month. To take your family to KFC, that’s a week’s wages. You can’t do it. You can’t do anything. Not even take your family to KFC.”

So, despite his masters in social science, A works as a driver, first for tourists and now a taxi, which, unlike many other Cairo drivers, he owns himself, rather than renting.

A’s from a good family – his father was once high up in the army, and he grew up in the luxurious sports facilities and pools of the officers clubs that scatter the Cairo landscape.

But, yes, he’d like a better life. Of course he would.

And I can’t, honestly, imagine that driving layabouts like us, rich, by a geographical accident of birth, beyond his wildest dreams, helps his temper at all.

I rubbed A up the wrong way soon after meeting him, in fact, seduced by his good English and his broad knowledge – hell, in the West social sciences is a liberal degree — into speaking without thinking.

“My ex-wife,” he says. “She was just angry – angry all the time!”

This is not, to put it mildly, an uncommon complaint in Egypt, the ritual chant of angry men mystified by angry women, but this time my guard is down and my mouth just opens. “Well, if she was stuck at home all day with no job and nothing to do,” I say, “I’m not surprised.”

Whoops!

This would be rude anywhere, and hits a real nerve here. A is off. “This is what I tell her,” he says, his voice rising as he thumps the steering wheel. “I tell her: ‘You want a job! THIS is your job! You look after the house. You look after my child. You cook. You clean. And I pay you a wage! THIS is your job!’ I say.”

I let him vent for a while. His next complaint is also very familiar. “And she was jealous! So jealous! One time, she called me, and I was driving the taxi, and she heard a woman’s voice in the background. She was a customer! Like you! And she stayed on the phone until the woman got out of the cab.”

“Well…” I begin. I am about to say that I can see how a woman stuck at home, unable to be alone with a man who is not her husband or her family, could be jealous of a man who was out in the world and alone with other women all the time, who had a freedom of which she could not even dream. But I think better of it. “It must be difficult,” I say, placatingly. “How did you meet?”

“She was a friend’s neighbour,” A says. “I liked her. I wanted to go out with her, but you can’t have an Egyptian girlfriend, you can only have a Western girlfriend. If you want to get close to an Egyptian woman you need her to be your wife.”

“So you married?” I say.

“You have to marry,” A says. Extra-marital sex is risky for both parties – honour killings are alive and well here in Egypt, and the police do no intervene – so the typical courtship, with a few exceptions, goes no further than holding hands and talking.

We swing off the Corniche, away from the Nile, and onto Tahrir Square, a sorry encampment of shanty tents, souvenir sellers churning out flags and scarves, and, of course, the touts who always used to ply their trade here. There are a few men chanting and waving flags, but the police presence is subtle: on a nearby square we walk through every day, there’s an APC with mounted machine gun, in case of trouble.

“I was here in the Revolution,” A says. “The police shot me in the chest. The bullet missed my heart by four centimetres. Four centimetres!”

“So who are you voting for in the election?” I ask. I am still naive enough to understand that the belief that women should stay at home marks a man out as Islamist. “The Brothers?”

“No!” he says. “Look at the poster! I’m voting for him. He’s my family! We’re the largest family in Egypt. There are seven million people with my surname.”

The candidate in question is also some kind of cousin. He’s an independent candidate, whose poster exudes all the incorruptible trustworthiness of a Filipino or Indonesian local government candidate. That is to say, no farther than you could throw him, and even then don’t turn your back.

“Why are you voting for him?” I ask. “Apart from the fact that he’s family, of course.”

“Because he has great policies,” A says. “Under him, every university graduate will earn 3000 Egyptian pounds a month.”

That is, I guess, what dictatorship gets you.

Here’s how the logic goes, as far as I can tell. One man, Hosni Mubarak, screwed up the economy. Therefore, the next man, also one man, will fix it.

And fix it, further, so amazingly, so rapidly, that graduate salaries will increase by a factor of ten. Like magic! Just like last year’s revolution was going to eliminate corruption overnight.

“Mm,” I say.

Out in the rural quasi-suburbs near the pyramids of Dahshur, we pass a man on a donkey cart laden with animal feed, followed by a woman. Her head, her face and her body are covered, and the fine net mesh that almost eliminates peripheral vision covers her eyes. This is a relatively unusual sight here, still, so I point her out to Z.

“Look, Z!” I say. “She’s even covered her eyes.”

“The Brothers want this for all women,” A says. “Under the Brothers every woman will dress like this. I don’t want this!”

“Yes,” I say, relieved to find some common ground on the earth that, as with all these conversations, seems to slip away from my Western preconceptions every second. “It’s terrible.”

“I want to look!” A says. “I haven’t been with a woman for five years, since my divorce. For FIVE YEARS. I want to look, at least! And now they want to take even looking away from me.”

This is the first time I’ve heard this particular objection to this form of repression of women, and, though no more illogical than the logic by which men cover their own women and keep them at home while simultaneously chasing after tourists, it silences me.

“You,” A says, after a pause. “Are you married? Divorced?”

I decide to go with honesty. “Never married,” I say. “It’s not unusual in the UK. We’re not religious, so many people never marry.”

“So you are friends first, and then sometimes you don’t marry?” A says.

“Yes,” I say. “We make friends first.”

“This is what we need in Egypt,” A says, and in that moment I feel not the sexual frustration that fills the car as richly as his pungent aftershave but the grief and regret of a man who made a bad marriage and barely sees his only child. “To be friends first.”

“Yes,” I say. “But there are things that go with that. Women have jobs. They live on their own. They have their own money. We have lives of our own. And that’s what helps us to be friends first.”

More in this series:
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 1: The Coder
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 2: The Bedouin Girl
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 3: The Future Soldier
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 4: The Guide
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 5: The Businessman
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 7: The Working Mother

The post Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 6: The Taxi Driver appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

J laughs. “Yes!” he says. “I have been to Saudi Arabia. It’s quite a funny story.”

I nod encouragingly. J has a range of funny stories and some great Egyptian jokes.

“There were these three Russians who hired a boat,” J says. Russians are a visible minority among Sinai tourists, while Russian working girls often ply their trade in the hotspots of Sharm el Sheikh, and, apparently, Dahab. “There was vodka. There was food. And there were 34 Russian women. Beautiful women. Long blonde hair, bodies like….” J makes 38-24-38 curves with his hands. “34 women for three men…”

“We have a phrase in England,” I say, cutting him off from his revery. “’Natasha’. It’s not very…”

“Yes! Natashas!” J says. “And there were three Russians, me and the five guys I’d hired to work with me. I thought, y’know, with 34 women and 9 guys, we’re going to have fun… But this! It was girl on girl, two girls, three girls, three girls and a guy – and the Russians all too drunk to do anything.”

“It must have been amazing,” I say.

“So the captain was teaching the girls how to steer the boat,” J says, miming a hands-on demonstration of tiller craft. “And, of course, he was not looking where we were going. All of a sudden we are 30 metres off a beach! And the girls are naked, diving in the water, naked! And we…”

“Oh f*ck,” I say. “Not on a Saudi beach? You have to be a prince to get away with that, no?”

“A beach,” J says. “Dawn comes, so we go off. But the captain, he’s a bit, well, sleepy, you know?”

What with the vodka, the beer and the general excitement of a fullblown orgy, I can well imagine the chap being a little the worse for wear. “So we see these lights,” J continues. “And he says, ‘Here we are! We’re in Dahab!’ Then I look a bit closer, and I say, ‘This is not Dahab. We’re in Saudi Arabia…’”

“Oh f*ck…” I say, again.

But, surely, J wouldn’t be here talking to me if he’d inadvertently arrived in Saudi Arabia with a cargo of naked ladies, vodka and unconscious Russians? The punishment for even *drinking* alcohol is a public whipping.

“We were lucky,” J says. “It was Ramadan. So, after breakfast, there are two hours of prayers. And, in Saudi, EVERYONE has to pray. They’re praying, or they’re in their house. So we cast off, we leave, we make it back – and that was the time I visited Saudi Arabia.”

“In Parliament, now,” J says. “Do you know what they talk about?”

“No,” I say.

“They are discussing banning the teaching of English in schools, because it’s unIslamic. Whether this book or that book should be banned. What women should…”

“But your economy, J,” I say, genuinely outraged. I’m fond of Egypt. I want Egypt to do well. With 5000 years of recorded history and its vast land area, this beautiful country could be an African powerhouse, the hub between Asia and Africa… “It’s tanking! You have no industry. Tourism’s half what it was. Youth unemployment…”

“I know,” J says, wearily. “But this is not what they care about. This is not their priority… The problem is that in Egypt, we have, let’s say, the 80%. They are poor, and for them, God is their life…”

“If you’re that poor and your life is so bad, it’s important that there’s a new life that is better than this one,” I agree. “It’s important that when your baby dies…”

“…It becomes a little angel,” J says, making sardonic wing motions with his fingers.

“Egypt is like ten or fifteen countries rolled into one,” I say. “We don’t have this divide between rich and poor in England. It’s growing. But everyone in England has enough to eat. Hardly any babies die. And very few people are really religious.”

J continues. “So, these are the 80%, and they are almost all Muslim. Then you have 15%, who are, maybe, quite liberal. So, the 15%, they are not so religious, they are educated, they may be quite liberal, maybe even travel. Some, like me, they might even think that their daughters can have sex before they are married. And then the 5%, the super-rich, who can do anything. Satanism. Drugs. You name it…”

We swing back to politics. “The Muslim Brotherhood are very organised,” J says, and goes onto describe scenes of vote buying, intimidation and ballot stuffing at the last election. “That’s how they got 74% of the vote. With money, and with…” He mimes punching.

“But some were Salafis,” I say. “Some of that vote was the Salafis.”

“This is what they do,” says J. The oldest political organisation in the Arab world, the Muslim Brotherhood originated in Egypt in 1928 but was banned for many decades. “They are very clever. They split. So the Salafis look far out, and they, the Brotherhood, can look like the centre.”

“So…” I say, dipping a toe into the mindblowingly complex maelstrom that is Egypt’s upcoming presidential election. “The current election, where Aboul Fotouh has split from the Muslim Brotherhood, and they’re talking about supporting the army’s candidate, that’s so they can get the guy they want, then turn round to the army and say, ‘See? They wanted us?’”

“I think so,” says J. “During the Revolution, we had one party, which they call a ‘Christian party’, because one of the founders was Christian and it’s liberal, the Free Egyptians Party. Then one of the founders posted a picture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, with Mickey in a gallabiya and Minnie covered, and they said he mocked Islam, they said he hated Islam. It’s what they do. They’re clever.”

“But surely…” I say. “That 74% they cheated for, that’s close to your 80% of the country that are religious Islamists and poor, anyway, isn’t it? It’s close to what they would have got, had they just got out the vote.”

J nods.

“OK, J,” I say. The staff in the restaurant, all male, as in almost every Egyptian restaurant, are eyeing us not-terribly discreetly, clearly under the impression that J has got lucky. “There is something I really do not understand. So… You have these guys, these Muslim guys, observant Muslim guys, chasing after Western women in the tourist towns. And voting for women to be back in the home and covered, and wanting a covered wife. How does that compute?”

“Well,” J says. “Every man wants to have a Western woman.” (Sharm el Sheikh, the package resort down the coast, is popular with older Western women in search of toyboys, rather as some Western men head to the Philippines or Thailand for the ladies.)

“Yeah,” I say. “I noticed. And, we’re easy, aren’t we? But what is the thinking behind it with your own women? How DOES that work?”

“So, in this culture, a man, if he plays around, he believes that what he has done will come back to him. So, if he goes with a tourist, he thinks that next time it will be a man going with his wife, his mother, his sister – it will come back on him, you see? So he covers her, he keeps her locked up at home…”

That makes sense. Depressing sense. But sense. “OK,” I say. “And, I guess it gets worse. Because when you fuck these Western women, who do what only a prostitute would do here, you begin to think that if you let your women have any kind of freedom, they will become like us. Like prostitutes, basically.”

“Yes,” says J.

We pause. Then he asks, rather tentatively, “I heard that in England women can do all the jobs that men can. I mean, I believe that women can be better at some jobs than men. But you have women working as butchers? As bricklayers? Driving taxis?”

J has been to Europe, but only for a week: the relationship didn’t work out. “Yes,” I say. “Not many women. But it’s the law in England that a man cannot refuse to give a woman a job because she’s a woman, or because of someone’s skin colour, or their sexuality, or their religion. Those are unusual choices. But we are free to make them.”

We talk a bit about religion then swing back to politics again, although in Egypt the two are inextricably enmeshed. “So, how do you think it’s going to go here now, after the revolution?” I ask.

“Well,” says J. “I think in five years, ten years time, Egypt is going to be like Saudi Arabia.”

In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive or appear in public showing more than their eyes and their hands: the legal system includes punishments such as beheading, whipping and, on rare occasions, blinding, and on one occasion the religious police beat back young girls to die in their burning boarding school because they had run from a fire immodestly clad.

“No democracy?” I say.

“No,” J says, looking around and lowering his voice. “The problem is, in some ways, I think things were better under the old regime. You could talk against Mubarak, at least in private, and people did. But you can’t argue with Allah. And that’s what these people say, that they are the voice of Allah.”

“So, no democracy in your lifetime?”

“No,” says J. “I think, 30 years from now, we will have another revolution, and this time we will have democracy. But I’ll be an old, old man by then.”

More in this series:
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 1: The Coder
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 2: The Bedouin Girl
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 3: The Future Soldier
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 4: The Guide
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 6: The Taxi Driver
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 7: The Working Mother