Mona - January 28th, 2011

I call their landline in Alexandria every hour or so. The cell phones are still cut. This is our only recourse.

My mother answers with the same shrill cheerfulness she has been feigning since January 25th.

‘Oh, hello dear, so nice of you to call. Again. How was school?’

‘The school is closed, mama. It’s a Friday. I don’t think we’ll be open on Sunday. Have you watched the news?’

Of course she has. Everyone across the nation has been glued to the TV for the past three days. Few of us sleep, and when we do, the TV stays on, just in case something even more horrid than the shooting of protesters, the cutting of the internet and cell phone lines, the burning of official buildings, the ransacking of banks and shops can happen.

But then it gets worse. The army announces on TV that police stations and prisons have been set fire to, that criminals are let loose upon all major cities and it’s up to us, the civilians, to protect our own neighbourhoods.

How? The people with guns are too busy killing the young protesters in Tahrir to protect our homes.

I’m 35, far too old to call myself young. I live a decent life as a primary school teacher at Lycee Francais on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, just off the corner of Tahrir Square where it all began. I was living in my uncle’s flat in Garden City, but when the riots broke out three days ago– or should I call them protests? I’m not sure what the correct terms are – my family insisted that I move to stay with my friend Amani.

It’s not safe for a young woman to be alone in this time so near to the trouble, my father had said. I gladly agreed. I don’t sleep as it is. And knowing that my parents are back home in Alexandria, old and defenseless against the chaos that has erupted, leaves me anxious all day.

‘Did you see what happened to the governor’s house in Alex?’ my mother attempts a conversational tone.
‘They said they ransacked his house and put his underwear on lampposts, jeering. The poor man, I hope they were clean underwear at least.’

Streets away from my parents’ home, the governor’s office is on fire. It was set on fire earlier today and has been burning throughout the night. No one has come to set out the fire. Not one single fire brigade. And it’s a government building.

‘How is the street outside?’ I attempt to glean information, find out if they have access to food and water. Maybe they can leave the house and join my uncle in Gleem? But no, movement is futile. The streets are packed with riot police beating young protesters away.

‘Those poor boys,’ my mother sighs, ‘I watched them get beaten and run away. And then somehow, they turned back and ran at the police. And the policemen ran away. Can you believe it? The cowards ran!’

I’m beginning to suspect that underneath her pearls and bridge games on Sundays; my mother is a closet socialist. Normally so conservative and evasive in her political opinions, she breaks into hiccups of delight and enthusiasm every time something very bad happens to the police and the regime.

‘And then they somehow managed to turn the police truck over, can you imagine? And then they set fire to it! Where did they find the petrol so quickly?’ she muses out loud.

‘Mama, are you safe?’I breathe into the phone; Amani places a cup of hot black tea next to me and pats me lightly on the shoulder. I have welded my body into this armchair in front of the TV for the past five hours. I think.

‘Oh we’re fine, we just have to keep all the windows shut because of the tear gas, you know,’ her cheerfulness is bordering on panic.
‘But we have enough food and water for three days and your father has taken out his hunting rifles.’

‘His what?’ I gulp.

‘Well, he and the men in the building have to stand guard outside our house tonight, on account of the vandals and bad men and all that,’ she mutters vaguely.

‘Can I talk to him?’

‘Not right now, darling, he’s busy polishing his hand gun.’

My father is seventy two years old.

There is a photo of him reclining on a rock on Stanley Beach in the sixties, chiseled muscles flexed in his tiny bathing suit, as he flashes a debonair grin at the camera, a god above the waves.

‘Your father was always the hero,’ my mother would laugh. ’Always saving pretty young women from the dangerous tides of the North Sea.’

‘What about the ugly ones?’ I would ask, and she would splutter in laughter.

‘You will never find a man that matches your father,’ she told me. ‘You will spend your whole life trying and comparing; but there is no man like him.’

And she was right.

Did I tell you my baba was a leader of the student socialist movement in Abdel Nasser’s time? He was the head of all Alexandrian university unions, the organizer of all protests.

One day, he travelled to Russia for a university volleyball tournament. When he returned, two of his comrades had disappeared, never to be heard of again. He left the union right there and then, and never touched politics again.

I am my father’s biggest prize. His biggest accomplishment. My Masters’ and PHD certificates hang above his armchair in the living room, and he never stops boasting about his daughter, the anthropologist. He neglects to mention the unmarried and working as a school teacher part, and his friends are too polite to point it out. But these things matter, especially in Alexandria, where your accolades are weighed by how many children you have produced; not certificates.

‘Your PHD didn’t get you a husband, did it?’ my aunt once snidely noted. I avoid weddings, and social gatherings, and teas with my aunt who always has a potential groom spontaneously stopping by for a chat and a once-over.

I’m 35, I’m veiled, I’ve never smoked a cigarette nor touched liquor in my life. I’m content with God, my little flat and the children’s faces, chalkboards ready to be written on.

I’m lonely, yes. But I have my friends. And now a group of unknown faces are camped out in my house. Funny story; I left the key of the flat with my colleague Rehab on the 26th, so that she could rest there if she needed refuge from the protests. She called me the next day to ask me if she could bring a friend along.

I stopped by later that night and found twenty people in scarves and thick jackets sitting in my living room. They all stopped in their tracks when I walked in, bashful children caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

Rehab explained that they were her friends from the protests, activists, journalists, all very decent people who all surprisingly needed to pee at the same time. And use my internet connection; apparently the only one still working. I didn't quite know how to kick out a bunch of teargassed, exhausted, politely pleading faces, so I asked them to not ruin the Turkish carpet and please smoke outdoors. And then I left.

Amani says she will go to the flat tomorrow to check on it. I have a feeling my home has become something more to someone else. Maybe I'm helping them somehow. Such nice kids.

I call again just before midnight.
This time, my mother’s time is edgy and fed up.

‘He’s on the street with the boys and he won’t come upstairs,’ she breathes into the phone.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s taken down his two hunting rifles and his handgun and has organized a little neighbourhood militia. You know those lovely boys on the third floor? Apparently, they know how to make Molotov cocktails. Who’d have thought? And someone conveniently found a few butchers knives.’

‘What?’ I don’t quite know whether to laugh or cry. My seventy-two-year old father is guarding my neighbourhood.

‘Well, because of the thugs and stuff, ‘she says huffily.

‘They even have walkie talkies, so they’re communicating with the other patrol at the end of the street. They caught two men an hour ago. They found them robbing a shop, and their ID papers said they were police. Can you imagine? The police are robbing us!’

At this point I can imagine anything.

‘Yes, Mama, but when will he come upstairs?’

‘Are you joking? He’s having the time of his life! The shift was supposed to end at nine, but he’s refusing to come up. He’s showing the boys how to use the hunting rifles and everything. He’d have been a good army general, you know.’

‘Oh that’s good news, then,’ I mutter weakly, and for once in my life, wish Amani had something stronger than black tea. Whiskey perhaps. I’ve never had a drink, but now seems like a good time to start. Veil or no veil.