photo courtesy of Claire and Chuck Davis, http://yannatry.blogspot.com/
The call to evening prayers sounds, and I am, at last, where I began this story.
The song from the Muezzins drifts into the station, the stretched notes settling over the city like a mist, and unleashing the scramble of faithful that I am swimming against, toward a track that I hope will be occupied by a train, and a car, and a seat with my number on it.
At platform eight – I know I’m there because I counted them – I sit on my pack and look into the empty bay. There is no train, but I am early and I still have faith. At least there’s a track. It sits silent but expectant, rails gleaming above the paper cups and trash. The train will be here – he told me it would.
Thirty minutes of waiting by an empty track allows doubt to creep back in. But after forty-five, as the doubt takes over, a train arrives. If the man selling tea understood my question, and I understood his response, this may indeed be the train to Luxor. But it’s still early, and I try not to get my hopes up. I decide to hold my position on the platform as long as I can. My thinking is that I want to be as far down the track as possible before anyone looks at my ticket. It’s not so much that I doubt Gamal. I believe that he believes that this paper will get me to Luxor, and I know I paid good money for it. It’s just that I’m not sure the conductor will be willing to buy into our reality.
I am starting to worry the train might pull away without me. It is making noise, and I don’t have any idea what “all aboard” sounds like in Arabic, so I get on. After three more inquiries of assorted not-very-official looking station employees, and one fellow passenger, I am fairly certain that this is the right train, but beyond that – car, seat; window, aisle – I am completely winging it. I cannot decipher my ticket, and I don’t dare show it to anyone, lest the whole house of cards collapse.
I choose a car solidly and safely in the middle of the train. It is surprisingly empty for being sold out. Two Egyptian looking businessmen sit near the front, and a young couple who appear to be tourists sit near the middle. I take a seat across the aisle from the couple thinking that their pleasant, well-scrubbed foreignness might add to my own legitimacy. The chair is big and comfortable and covered in new cloth.
There is nothing like the relief of sitting down on a train in a very foreign place – for the foreseeable future there will be no decision-making, no wrong turns, no struggle. There will only be sitting peacefully and looking out the window, and occasional trips to the bathroom, which will conveniently travel along with me at exactly the same speed, or maybe the dining car. And all the while, with no effort on my part, I will be moving inexorably toward my goal.
The young, pleasant couple beside me is Irish, here on holiday. They are friendly, and the song in their accents makes me feel safe. They bought their tickets at a travel agency because they heard you couldn’t buy them at the station. I think they find it strange when I ask if I can look their tickets, but they are nice people – happy and on holiday far from home – and they oblige me. I want to stay with them, travel with them through the rest of Egypt and then follow them home. I can pick up a flight from Dublin, or wherever it is they are from. I know this is not possible, but I like the thought of it. Their tickets are two beautiful tones of blue set against a creamy white on crisp, heavy card stock. They look exactly like tickets. Panic rises in me, but I am resolute, or at least not getting up from my comfortable seat.
The train begins a series of lurches like a seizure, and then a slow, steady roll. It is too late now to do anything but ride it. It is darker now than when I arrived at the station, and the lights of Cairo become intermittent and finally tail off more quickly than seems reasonable, becoming pinhole burns in the darkening western horizon.
At the front end of the car the door opens with a whish of air, and a man steps through it. He’s tall with a handsome, rugged face and graying moustache, dressed in a white robe over a crisp dishdasha and light blue knotted turban. He’s dressed as if he could be a baggage handler or an older man from the country, but he walks like he is in charge of something more important. The clothes look more like a costume on him than something he puts on everyday. He walks quickly down the aisle looking from side to side as if taking an inventory of each car and it contents. As he passes me is robe hangs open for a second, and I see a flash of black metal. It is dull like coal, but it catches my eye, and sucks my gaze into its darkness. I want to look away, but I can’t even when I am able to make out the wicked curve of the magazine protruding from the submachine gun’s belly.
In Israel every pimply faced teenager seemed to be strapped with some type of automatic weapon, so it’s not like I’m not used to seeing them now. Still, the sight of it takes my breath away. Before I start breathing again, he is past, and no one else seems to have noticed anything about him.
I wonder silently how I should tell the Irish people that there is a terrorist with a machine gun who is going to kill us on our train.
This is the moment that every junior high school boy contemplates at one time: how will I react? In the bank robbery, the school hostage taking, hijacking? Will I save everyone? Will I save myself? Will I fold up like a card table and cry? It turns out I will do nothing.
The door swishes shut at the other end of the car, and the terrorist is gone. I sink into my seat trying to disappear. The front door opens again, and this time a man in a conductor’s uniform enters.
I should be glad to see him. It’s perfect. He is just the guy I should tell about the terrorist who is going to kill us all. But I do nothing. It seems my fear of the being found out as the holder of a fraudulent ticket roughly equals my fear of the man with the machine gun, and I am at terror equilibrium. Paralyzed, I sink further into my seat and watch as he passes without saying anything. I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I will not, at least for now, be thrown off of the train, thus preserving my opportunity to be shot later.
In what seems like only seconds the conductor returns to our car, this time checking tickets. The Irish present their shiny, beautiful tickets, and the back door opens once more. In walks the man with the machine gun, and the muscles in my back tighten in anticipation of gunfire. I dumbly pull the crumpled paper from my pocket and hand it to the conductor, no longer sure what I am hoping for. He looks at it, and looks at me, then looks at it again turning it over. I try to act normal – as if I pass off bad counterfeits all the time – while in the back of my mind knowing that it doesn’t really matter, since the man from the Islamic Brotherhood is going to kill us any minute anyway.
The conductor’s attention is drawn away by the gunman. They address one another, and smile and the gunman claps a hand on the conductor’s shoulder. The machine gun is in full view of the conductor. They seem to know each other. In fact, they look to be old friends. A man in a police uniform steps into the car at the opposite end and sees the gunman. My paralysis keeps me from hitting the floor. But instead of drawing his weapon, the policeman walks up to the gunman, and waits until he is finished talking to the conductor until he addresses him. The gunman responds with what sounds like authority, and the policeman nods.
I cannot imagine who else I would not want standing beside me at this moment. All three – terrorist, conductor, cop – represent serious potential problems for me. At this point, they might as well throw in an undead zombie clown just for the hell of it. The conductor continues to turn my paper over in his hands as if deciding to which of these authorities he should hand me over. Another cop enters the car and also speaks to the gunman. After a brief exchange, the new cop nods and the gunman hands him the machine gun. It dawns on me that either these two officers have just made a very smooth arrest, or the gunman is actually their boss, and is working the train “undercover.”
At about the same time, I conclude that I am probably going to jail – an Egyptian jail. My guidebook advises that, if at all possible, you should avoid going to an Egyptian hospital. In fact, it goes so far as to suggest administering first aid to yourself, and getting on the earliest flight almost anywhere else if you can manage it. It doesn’t say anything at all about the prisons. I wonder what gangs operate in Egyptian prisons? Perhaps Nazi skin heads will not be a problem here, but surely there will be others.
I will read the Quran. Yes, I will read the Quran every morning! I will join a study group and become the star pupil winning friends who will protect me in knife fights! I will have to learn Arabic, though – shit! I will have to learn Arabic and that could take awhile.
Thankfully, the conductor’s voice interrupts my crazy train of thought. “May I see your student card please?” He is speaking to me.
“My what?”
“Your student card. I need to see it with this ticket please.”
I wasn’t aware that I’d bought a student ticket, but I do remember reading that a valid student card could save you fifty percent on train fares. I hadn’t bothered trying because getting a normal ticket was so impossible. The profit margin for Gamal and his friend in the railway office was more than I had realized. But I have one – yes I have a card! I got it in New York using an old student ID with dates I altered. I pull it out from the pages of my passport, and hand it over like I’m playing my final ace.
He looks at it, then back at me, then at the ticket one more time, and finally at the seat number riveted to the luggage rack above my head.
“Oh, is the right seat?” I ask. “I really wasn’t sure.”
“Yes, it’s OK.” He nods and hands my card and ticket back to me.
“This is the train to Luxor, yes?” I am again speaking with a foreign, vaguely European accent.
“Yes, of course.” He nods before he moves on.
Yes of course. Yes of course it is! This is the train to Luxor, and I’m on it all night!
I burrow into my seat, never wanting to leave it, and feel the comforting rumble of the tracks passing beneath me. I smile and mouth a silent, “thank you” to Gamal, my brother in Cairo.
The ticket