Free Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes by Kamal Al-Solaylee Page A

anthems, hastily released to win the PR war, used the date in what you might call now a branding exercise. “The sixth of October reunited us as a nation—an Arab nation” were the words we were forced to sing for months afterwards during morning assemblies. And as soon as injured soldiers were shipped to Cairo hospitals, the school arranged bus trips for the students to pay tribute to the “heroes.” My mother intensely disliked these new trips to faraway military hospitals, in part because you could never show up empty-handed and she had to buy us boxes of chocolates to give the soldiers.
    Money was getting tight just as Safia’s children were growing up and demanding more. The household expenses gobbled up all our income, which now consisted only of the interest—and occasionally part of the principal—of my father’s savings in the UK. When the exchange rate of the English pound went down, so did our disposable income. On weeks with exchange-money surplus, my parents took the youngest four children to the cinema on Thursday nights. Every other month, Mohamed would drag us to the more expensive live theatre to watch popular Egyptian comedies. Performances always started as late as 10 p.m. and would last until 1 or 2 a.m., by which time I would have fallen asleep in my mother’s lap.
    The inflation that hit the West after the 1973 war also hit Egypt and our family’s finances. Until then, if you were poor in Egypt you somehow still managed to eat a full meal and have a roof over your head. By 1974 even such basics proved more than many Egyptians could afford. I cringe when I think that the cleaning maids my parents hired at the time got paid ten to twenty Egyptian pounds a month. No wonder they occasionally stole food from the kitchen or small household items—which infuriated my mother, who felt the pinch herself. Our maid for many years, Enayat, came from the working-class district of Shoubra and always showed up for work late because of the crowded buses and traffic congestion. She was only in her forties but had severe back and neck pains and was a widowed mother of, if I remember correctly, two teenage children. She always had bruises on her arms or legs or came in with her traditional Egyptian clothing all covered in dirt, as she kept tripping and falling when running to catch the overcrowded bus. She ate the leftovers from our lunches and dinners and wrapped up what she didn’t get through in a white scarf to give to her children. Even back then, Enayat would recall the better days of the 1960s and complain about this new, harsher way of life in Cairo. By no means am I suggesting that there was a social cohesiveness in Egyptian society before then, but in the years after the 1973 war the country divided along economic lines: the ultra rich, the struggling middle classes and the impoverished poor.
    CHANGE. AGAIN. THIS TIME the pace was slower but the effect just as long-lasting. Stories of break-ins, muggings and violent crimes became part of our lives. They usually took place in more impoverished parts of town or very late at night, but like all middle-class families we had to watch our backs. We could sense the anger of some Egyptians and, as the civil war in Lebanon was starting in 1975, also feel it in the waves of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees. Nasser’s agenda of a secular pan-Arabism had broken apart only four years after his death.
    By 1976, my oldest brother, Helmi, was the first to bring some of these hardened attitudes inside the family home. A handsome, secular law student at Cairo University, Helmi fell under the spell of rebellious Egyptian middle-class men his age who discovered that neither socialism nor Sadat’s new free-trade philosophy and nascent pro-capitalism would improve lives. Islam, until then relegated to the sides of the political landscape, emerged as an alternative. For many years Sadat’s mantra went something like this: No politics in religion and no religion in