Three poets sat in my salon, the A/C churning, only one of us not chain-smoking. Egyptian and erudite, my guests had all lived for some years in the US; the eldest, a devoted Marxist, had served six years in the Egyptian army. The two younger ones met in an immigration line at Seattle airport and discovered they had mutual friends back in Cairo. One still lives in the US, but wishes he didn’t.
We drank Lebanese arak (‘sweat’ in Arabic, in this case, of grapes) and talked about Egypt. I’d passed through Liberation Square, near my flat, that morning. The central rotunda, epicentre of sit-in protests until August, was ringed with black-clad military police holding Plexiglas shields and sticks resembling ski poles. The scene was surreal: a circle of dirt with a few shrub-like trees surrounded by a stream of heavy traffic under 24-hour guard. What are they protecting? I asked.
