Last Night in Brighton

Chapter 4

4. Exodus

مصر

יציאת

I never anticipated I would even want to go back, until I could not. So maybe I deserve exile. I squandered my chance.

I had not slept much the night before. When I woke, the sun had risen over the pyramids, visible so clearly in the distance from my little hotel room in Giza. I left the room tidy. I did not want to leave a bad impression. The door was heavy. It closed with a thud. Then whatever mechanisms lock the door electronically — incomprehensible to me, who had never been good with tech — made a little hiss, and it was done. Sealed. The cab to Downtown Cairo sputtered along grand motorways with what felt like a dozen lanes, wrapping around large apartment buildings and a frenzy of billboards for Lipton Tea and politicians. The cabby offered me a Cleopatra cigarette. With my sallow, mournful, unrested face and bloodshot eyes, I must have looked like I needed a cigarette. I thanked him and inspected it before putting it in my mouth. He seemed to have ripped off the filters. Go hard, I thought, with appreciation.

‘You’re headed to the airport shuttle?’ he asked, speeding along. I noticed his teeth were the colour of dried tobacco leaves.

I nodded. I looked away, out the window, at the frenzy of Cairo on its way to work, my arm perched on the windowsill. If I could have known it would be my last time, I would have stared more intently and made mental notes of everything. I would have filled my pockets with dirt.

‘I was visiting my grandfather who raised me,’ I said.

‘Why were you at a hotel then?’ the cabby asked. ‘And why is your Arabic accent so poor?’

I rifled through my carry-on backpack, sitting between my feet. I withdrew my smartphone and pulled up a photo of my grandfather Wassim.

‘He left Egypt when he was my age,’ I told the cab driver. ‘He never came back.’

‘My goodness. He was handsome, wasn’t he?’ the cabby exclaimed.

‘You mean to say I look like a steaming pile of trash, by comparison,’ I said. We laughed. I wasn’t offended. I am happy to be ugly by comparison.

‘So you came here alone?’ the cabby asked.

‘I came here to see him. I dreamt I would meet him here again’ , I said.

‘I’m sorry — I’m afraid I don’t really understand,’ the cabby said.

‘I had a dream. In the dream, his ghost was waiting for me in Egypt,’ I said.

‘And what happened?’ the cabby said, suddenly very serious.

‘I didn’t find him,’ I replied. ‘He’s dead.’ The cabby nodded.

I flicked my cigarette butt out the window. I saw it in the rearview, little sparks as it tumbled back wards.

‘What can I say?’ I continued. ‘My dreams are misleading. I guess I’m not psychic’ .

‘Thank Heaven,’ the cabby said. ‘Who wants to know the future?’

‘Thank Heaven.’

My trip to Egypt had almost cost me my life. Maybe I would have seen my grandfather Wassim if that were the case. But I do thank Heaven I don’t have the foresight to have known how difficult that trip would be, or I wouldn’t have gone. And if I had not gone back at that moment in my life, I would have never seen it at all — the time-before land. Not in this reality, at least.

There were just a few people on the airport shuttle bus in the very particular situation of needing to catch a flight from a much smaller airport than Cairo International, an airport several hours north. There was a single empty seat next to me. Twice, in between surveying the large expanses of nothing, punctuated on occasion by some fields, a little hamlet, a small and stately mosque, I put my hand on the arm rest between us, my palm facing upward, fingers parted where his hand would have been.

I thought about Passover during the three hour bus ride. Jewish Egyptian people frequently use the term Exodus when they describe how we were made to leave Egypt after the occupation of Palestine in 1948. The Passover comparisons are a bit overdone, but it is indeed worth a moment’s amusement that since time immemorial, our ancestors celebrated a holiday marking the Jewish departure from Egypt while we were a part of that land and that people. Several things, beyond Egypt and my departure from it, struck me as a kind of Passover in that moment. First, the Passover liturgy says specifically that in each generation, we must see ourselves as going out of Egypt. And then there was the fact that customarily, Jewish families — not just Egyptian — set an empty place for the Prophet Elijah at the Passover table. I was predisposed by my faith to nourishing things I cannot see or hold. I felt embarrassed for having come to Egypt. And yet the cabby that morning seemed to have understood the undertaking, even if he had never had the privilege of enough disposable income to go on a long international flight, chasing ghosts and dreams.

Only as the bus driver turned into the airport — Borg el Arab — did I discover that it was located just outside of the Alexandria city gate, built in a Greek style, with grandiose columns and the city name in Arabic and Greek. It was a cruel and unexpected coincidence. I had meant to travel to Alexandria, to the street where Wassim lived. I never made it there because of my f*****g mental fragility.

In the airport waiting area, there was a bride fully prepared to get married upon our descent to my connecting flight in Dubai. She looked like a cream cake — lace and chiffon cascading from head to toe. She sweated like a pastry in a bakery window, her frosted makeup running like watercolour paints. She was trapped and suffocating in what was meant to be a place of joy. That was how I found Egypt, until I realised I could not go back, years after that departing flight.

A man on that plane to Dubai took the small, stale Arab bread the Emirates flight gave us, plastered it with butter and drizzled a packet of sugar on top, as you would have done. Only in that moment it occurred to me what a fool I had been to leave a place abundant with living memories of you. The most populous Arab nation, CNN always says.

At the end of the 1978 Egyptian film الصعود إلى الهاوية - El-Soud ila El-Hawiya - Rise to the Abyss, a traitor against the Egyptian people who has sold national secrets to the nation’s Western enemies realises the weight of what she has done when an intelligence agent repatriating her for trial tells her to behold the pyramids and the Nile.

‘This is Egypt, madame,’ he says.

Her face betrays a shot to the heart that prefigures her execution. My experience in that moment was similar, only it was not the pyramids or Nile that sobered me to my childish running from that exalted place, but an unhappy bride and a man making the best of a bad piece of pita — people like myself, taking the same ill-advised flight to a wealthy place.