“Wait,” he says.
In a minute he comes back with a plateful of cheese, bread and jam. I don’t wait to be asked and start eating.
“Do you know what this is?” He waits for me to eat everything before asking this question. “This is breakfast. But it’s not included in the price of the rooms for twenty pounds.”
“Ah, I see. Thanks!”
His eyes are still wide-open in amazement. But who does he find so amazing? Probably himself.
Funny cordon
“Lya, lya, lya — No, no, no.” I yell at the ambulance driver and in desperation add in Russian: “Don’t do this.”
But to my dismay he wants to rescue me all the same and brakes at the roadside police post. I get out of the car with a distressed and displeased grimace. The driver watches me go guiltily and with sympathy as if accompanying me to the scaffold. “It’s not your fault, brother,” I want to tell him: “It’s not your fault that I don’t know how to say in Arabic: a little further or a little closer but not at the police post.”
The gazes of the policemen flock to me like moths to a flame: a single foreign woman with a backpack climbing out of an ambulance at 1.30 a.m. I hoist on my backpack and in my despair start walking into the darkness thickening beyond the police post knowing full well that this is senseless.
“Hey! Ma’am! Please!”
The same old story for the hundredth time.
I have to play “cat-and-mouse” with the police every day and very nearly every fifty kilometers. They manage to catch me pretty often but I tear away from their claws every time. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, but it’s always fun.
So even now I can’t hold back a grin when I find myself surrounded by about eight hefty soldiers with automatic weapons blinking helplessly and discussing something amongst themselves. I recognize the Arabic words mit vein — “where from?” which one of them says to the other, evidently about me. And I shock the poor policemen even more by saying in Arabic:
“Min Rusiya. — From Russia.”
“Tatakalyam arabik?! — You speak Arabic?!” Their eyebrows shoot up.
“Shvaye-shvaye. — A little.”
“Shvaye-shvaye.” Cheered up tremendously they repeat after me.
The first fright passes — I’m a foreigner but at least not from another planet, I even speak like a human being, in Arabic, that is. Their faces grow warmer and the policemen become brave enough to start questioning me.
I hear the familiar le — “why”, which apparently relates to my most recent mode of transport, and start giving them my usual spieclass="underline"
“Ana seikha. Min Rusiya — Tyurki, Ordon, Syuriya, Mysr. — I’m travelling. From Russia to Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Egypt.”
“Mashi? — By foot?”
“Lya mashi. Mashi shvaye-shvaye. Ana seiyara beduni fulius. — Not by foot. A little by foot. I go by car with no money.”
“Beduni fulius,” one of the policemen repeats this unusual combination, all the more unusual coming from a foreign girl.
“Aiva, seiyara beduni fulius. Lya taksi, lya bus, lya shorta, lya mushkele. — Right, by car for no money. No taxi, no bus, no police, no problem.”
The last two phrases provoke a flash of delight, but it goes silent suddenly. The boss is approaching. All the bosses at all the posts look suspiciously alike as if they all had a special subject at schooclass="underline" rules for police-boss behavior.
They’re always dressed better than the others, but never in uniform. The relationship between the boss and his soldiers recalls that between a grandee and his vassals. He often sits at a desk somewhere in the shade if it’s daytime, or inside if it’s night. If he wants to smoke someone takes out a cigarette and gives it to him, and someone else lights it; if he gets thirsty yet another guy goes running for a Pepsi. The boss accepts these services as his due, with a self-important and arrogant look. It all reminds me of kids playing at being king. One sits on the throne while all the others serve him. Until someone thinks up a coup.
The boss often knows English. But this doesn’t really help us come to any understanding. This time too he commands:
“A bus is on the way, you’re going to Luxor.”
But Luxor lies behind me, I’ve just left the city.
“I’m not going to Luxor, I’m going to Aswan.”
“No, you’re taking the bus to Luxor!”
“I don’t need a bus, I need a free car.”
“There are no free cars!”
“So how do you think I got to Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Egypt from Russia?”
The boss has no answer for this and after giving his subordinates some kind of orders he leaves. The soldiers look at me with sympathy, expressing clearly that they’d be happy to help but do not have the authority to act against the will of their boss.
Like an enormous hedgehog with splayed spines, swaying from side to side, a tractor comes crawling by, its trailer filled with sugarcane.
I point to the treat:
“Oh!”
One of the soldiers tears off, still holding his gun, catches up to the tractor, yanks off a piece of cane and starts peeling it vigorously with his teeth on the way back. Pleased, he offers me a piece of the white sugarcane which I take right away. The policemen and soldiers watch me attentively like nannies pleased they have a treat for their “charge.”
Suddenly, an empty tour bus appears and generously takes me on board for free. Before boarding I turn back to my automatic-weapon-bearing yardkeepers:
“Shukran! Masalyam! — Thank you! Good-bye!”
“Masalyam!” They yell after me waving.
But the game heads in a new direction every time.
I’ve never been kicked out of a car before, though this didn’t prevent the policeman leaning in the driver’s window from interrogating him tediously and at length about how a foreign woman got into his vehicle, where she is going and… At one point I suddenly started speaking loudly in Arabic:
“Mafi mushkele! Tammam! Yelle, yelle!” — There’s no problem! Everything’s fine! Let’s go, let’s go!”
The discouraged policeman didn’t know what to do with a foreign woman unexpectedly speaking Arabic and he had to let us go.
Afterwards I learned to cover my face with my hand as we approached the police posts. When the policemen see only a headscarf they obviously take me for a local woman.
Sometimes I break the rules shamelessly.
With a firm stride I walk past the post towards the road and the unknown. For the first few seconds, the policemen can’t believe their eyes. Then they wake up and start calling to me:
“Hey! Ma’am!”
I don’t turn round, I keep looking ahead and imperceptibly increase my speed heading towards a saving turn I can see lying ahead. Just a few more steps and… The voices grow quiet, I disappear from the soldiers’ field of vision and they evidently decide I’m merely a vision not to be chased down. They probably just repeat to themselves: “Auzu bi lliakhi min ash-shaiti radzhim — I turn to the Lord away from sly Satan.”
But the “cat” doesn’t always let the “mouse” go so easily.
One time I walked past a post under cover of dense night. But slightly further on I ran into an ambush: a patrol car on the side of the road. I decided to convince the two policemen who came leaping out that I did not in fact exist. Not responding to their cries I proudly and fearlessly moved off into the darkness. But when I decided I was already safe the timid hum of a motor came from behind. Turning back I saw that a police van filled to bursting with policemen and soldiers was creeping along behind me in first gear.