Anyone watching Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Egypt’s uprising would have seen the tent-packed rotunda in the centre of a teeming Liberation Square. The camera was sitting on the rooftop terrace of my friend Pierre, who had opened his home to the protesters. On any given day a hundred or so activists, journalists, friends and strangers milled about, slept on mattresses, cooked soup to take to the stalwarts on the square, uploaded and downloaded news or used the precious bathroom facilities before returning to the fray. Pierre offered refuge to the demonstrators, and a birds-eye view of an historic moment to the world.
A large, imposing Egyptian with hair that rises like wisps of smoke from his head and a chaotic beard to match, Pierre is trilingual, cultivated, and of a radical, contrarian bent. He used to feed dozens of stray cats on his sprawling tenth-floor empire, a space that also served as pedestal for two of downtown’s most spectacular billboards. The metal frames supporting them lent his roof a sort of Mir space-station aesthetic, something futuristic and doomed. Ditto the contortions of his cactus garden, the only things that could thrive on air that boasts one of the highest lead contents in the urban world. We spent many a happy hour with Cairo’s flabbergasting glory spread out at our feet, the Nile a silvery-grey ribbon amidst braids of traffic. Never did we imagine how that view might one day be transformed by a sea of humanity.
