Americans Abroad No. 6
Mirage, Sahara Desert
©1989 UrbisMedia
Heliopolis, Egypt, 1989. Mahmoud looked worried. That wasn’t a good sign; after all he was my Egyptian tour manager, the guy who was supposed to soothe any anxieties my group would have in this ancient, exotic, and somewhat unnerving land of the Pharaohs. We’d been there less than an hour and already there was a crisis.
At 2AM my fifty charges, exhausted beyond the normal by our plane’s delay in Rome, were sweltering in a bus in the Heliopolis airport parking lot wondering what in the hell had happened to Josh. I was wondering too. And more worrisome, it looked like Mahmoud was wondering, and this was his country and he was supposed to know what was going on!
Poor Josh; it had been forty-five minutes since those two armed guards took him out of the passport control line and led him away. No sign of him since, and the security people, fondling their automatic weapons, were giving Mahmoud the old shrug every time he inquired. He came back to me on the other side of passport control and said that everything was OK, just some mix-up about the luggage, maybe. But his face (Egyptians can have very expressive as well as handsome faces) said he was seriously worried. I was glad that the rest of the group is out in the bus because some Egyptian lady holding a baby was in hysterics over by the control desk, kids were running around screaming (lots of kids; this place needed a family planning program), and it was ninety degrees in spite of the hour in this dingy, strictly utilitarian terminal building.
The luggage. That could be the problem because Josh, despite being a very nervous fellow, was, as it happened, the one person who failed to follow my instructions not to check his luggage straight through to Cairo because we had an overnight stopover in Rome. That meant that his luggage must have been riding around on the baggage carousel for hours, arousing suspicion.
Josh was worried about what might happen to it. But maybe he was worried because he had something in that suitcase that was illegal to take into Egypt, or otherwise compromising: drugs, pornography, a weapon, political literature, bibles, one of those inflatable sex dolls? Nah, I shook my head. He was too nervous a guy to take any such chances. Hell, he’d been driving me nuts with questions: Can he drink the water? Can he wash with the water? Can he look at the water? Just what I needed, an aquaphobe on a Nile Cruise, and now they might be getting ready to hang him in a gibbet in Tahrir Square because he’s a Western pervert or God knows what.
Then Anwar arrived. He’d been out there on the bus keeping the group occupied with introductory remarks about Egypt, but most of the group had fallen asleep on him. He and Mahmoud switched to Arabic. That’s a bad sign; unless they use the words for “good morning,” “thankyou,” “do you have a toilet,” and “too expensive,” I’m out of the conversation. Mahmoud seemed to be explaining that the guards wouldn’t tell him anything and Anwar threw an unreassuring smile of reassurance over my way. Anwar struck me as the more serious and businesslike of these two guys.
Now a line of about two-hundred Egyptian soldiers was marched in by their officers to go through passport control. They looked ragged and tired, but very happy, like they were just told they didn’t have to fight any Israelis this week. Their officers kept making them tighten up the line, until they were squeezed up against one another. Maybe he figured they could keep warm this way, in spite of the fact that it was still about ninety-five degrees at this hour and you could wring the humidity out of the air. Why would they want to make their soldiers look like a conga line in a gay bar? Another of those ancient mysteries of Egypt, I guess, like the mysterious disappearance of Josh.
My thoughts snapped back to him. I hoped he wasn’t having a dreadful experience. They have ways of getting people to talk in this part of the world, and they might get their kicks doing it. He should just tell them what they want to know. Anything. Tell them he knows where Hoffa is buried. Admit that he was the second gunman on the grassy knoll in Dallas. Convert to Islam. But Josh was a really nervous guy, almost paranoid about being away from his fourth-grade class back in Petaluma. He seemed pretty naive for a guy approaching fifty. What if they pushed him into a nervous breakdown, or worse?
I tried to force words like “next of kin” from my mind when I noticed Mahmoud and Anwar had disappeared. I decided to head back out to the bus and check on the rest of the pack, walking through a pick up soccer game that a dozen young Egyptian kids who were playing under the harsh glare of the parking lot lights. They raced around on the tarmac surface shoeless as though it were the middle of the afternoon rather than the middle of night. The air was a thick stew of the spicy aromas of sweat and decay in a matrix of diesel and jet exhaust.
The group on the bus were exhausted, anxious, and getting angry. Some suggested that they be driven to the hotel, claiming that their suffering and waiting would do nothing to hasten the return of Josh. Their sympathy for him was being replaced by self-pity. But there was no feasible way to grant that request. Our hotel is way off to the west, in Giza, the driver spoke no English, and our tour managers had disappeared into some torture chamber in the terminal. I do my best to assure the group that we will be on our way soon, although I was personally beginning to doubt it. Just to get away from the complaints I headed back toward the terminal, pausing to return an errant soccer ball with an angry foot.
I was nearly to the terminal when I saw them come out of the door: Anwar and Mahmoud on either side of Josh. Anwar had his arm on Josh’s shoulder. I strained my eyes to see if any limbs were missing.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Josh blurted with a mixture of anger and sadness, before I had a chance to say anything. Now the four of us walked through the soccer game toward the bus. Mahmoud made a face to me that I took to mean “don’t bother him, I’ll fill you in later”. Josh looked haggard, but we all did by this time, so I couldn’t tell if his wasted appearance owed anything to physical abuse.
When we got to the bus a cheer went up, as much for the fact that we could now head for the hotel as for the return of the prodigal Josh. Some people welcomed him warmly, some made cracks about things that might have been in his luggage. Josh ignored them all, making his way to the back of the bus on rubbery legs where he sat in silence as we set off toward Giza. Some turned to ask Josh questions but he just kept his head in his hands. Fearing that something terrible might have happened to him, they left him alone.
By the time we were on the long road leading out to Giza, a road that had been a trail through farms fifteen years earlier and was now lined with shabby apartments and run down shops that looked a century old, most of the group were asleep in their seats. I took the opportunity to ask Anwar and Mahmoud to give me the story, but they asked me to wait until we got the group all settled in their rooms at the hotel. This made me more nervous, as though the matter wasn’t quite over yet as far as the “authorities” were concerned.
It was well after 3 AM when I got to sit with them in a corner of the cafe at the hotel.
“OK, let’s have the story, all the gory details,” I insisted. I made myself sound petulant, since they know I have some control over the tipping from the group and it is well to maintain good relations with me.
Anwar complied. “The authorities suspected that Mr. Joosh. . . ,”
“Mr. Josh,” I corrected.
“That Mr. Jawsh is a terrorist.”
“What! A terrorist !? I yelped, a little too loudly. “The guy’s a fourth grade teacher from Modesto who’s afraid of parking meters. A terrorist!? ” I realized that I was shouting, my words echoing off the marble tiles of the floor and walls.
They looked around a little nervously. Mahmoud, whose English was better, corrected: “They thought he was a terrorist because he has the same name as an extremist they are searching for.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me. C’mon you can be straight with me.” Now I was whispering.
“Not only the same name. . .well, actually, his first name in Arabic would be the same, like Josh,” Mahmoud explained. He said some name that sounded like ‘Yeshua.’ “And his last name is same as the family name of another famous terrorist.”
“So what! Lots of people have the same names.”
“But he had the same birthday as the terrorist”
This was getting to be too much of a coincidence. I considered relating the statistical story about if you get a random sample of twenty-five or so people in a room two of them will have the same birthday, but reconsidered.
“Really, did they show you this information?” I asked.
“Yes, from the computer,” Anwar replied. He didn’t seem to think this was such a great coincidence. “But they have no photo of this terrorist, so they had to contact other authorities for more information. That is why Mr. Joosh had to wait a long time.”
“Yeah, so long he had to piss in his pants,” I shot back. I had noticed Josh’s pants when we were handing out room keys in spite of his keeping his carry-on in front of his crotch.
“He is OK now, they think he is not a terrorist” Anwar put in.
“No, he’s a basket case. That guy couldn’t blow up a balloon, much less an embassy,” I fired back without the slightest sense of hyperbole.
“The authorities would not have investigated, but the suitcase of Mr. Joosh came before him and made them begin to investigate.”
I went to bed wondering how many crazy coincidences are occurring every day around us that we never become aware of because something as mundane as an unescorted piece of luggage doesn’t call them to our attention.
Unfortunately, Josh never really got over the incident. By mid-trip people realized that little jokes about bombs, or porno in his luggage only made him more reclusive and eventually they just left him alone.
I still wonder if Anwar and Mahmoud knew more, or withheld some details, of Josh’s night of terror. I still wonder whether I was supposed to come up with some baksheesh to spring Josh. Since it involved people with guns, I was rather hesitant to bring the matter up at the time. When I suggested to Anwar that “perhaps Mr. Joosh didn’t have the money for a permit or something,” as I had my hand in my pocket, I might have been a bit too oblique for him to pick up on the suggestion that I was willing to come up with some cash if necessary. In any case, maybe he and Mahmoud took care of it out of their own pockets and figured they’d make it up later on in tips. It takes a little time to figure things out in a country that’s been making a buck off tourists since Herodotus was passing through.
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©1999, ©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.11.2005)