Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 6: The Taxi Driver

We screech to a halt in heavy traffic – a car has accelerated across our path. A overtakes the other driver, blocks him in, and yells his feelings out of the window, before pulling back onto the highway at speed. Other drivers, used to this sort of thing, veer around us without hooting noticeably more than usual.

“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