The Summer Following the Spring Past the Winter

A very dear friend of mine, a young man who has lived in Cairo his whole life except for one visit to Mecca, wrote on his Facebook page today that he is giving up on Egypt; he is done trying to love her.

Love is hard, perhaps hardest when you love a woman as evasive and curvaceous as Egypt. We are not just speaking of Cleopatra here nor the bawdier queens of the Nile's once great pleasure barges. We are talking Egypt, incomparable Egypt, ineluctable Egypt. Love is hardest for the young. They are not cautious as their elders are. They wear neither armor nor life jackets; they dive even from cliffs without sounding the bottom of the ocean. Or the river. "If you drink from the waters of the Nile, you will always come back to her." This is the historic seduction of Egypt.

When I was there this June, the young man was resplendent. He may as well have been wearing the Egyptian flag for the way his pride was flying. My first night in this city, barely off the flights that had left Madison 18 hours earlier, he handed me an empty rifle shell. "It's from the Revolution," he told me, his eyes shining with emotion. It will always be my most treasured souvenir of this visit. Over the following days, as he demonstrated the unending generosity I would come to know as uniquely Egyptian, as he drove me wherever I wanted to go around Cairo, he introduced me to a vibrant city, a city full of color and light and commotion and happiness. He, like everyone I met in the early weeks of summer, had been part of the huge demonstrations that rolled over Cairo's streets this winter. And he, along with everyone else I met, from 8-year-old ragamuffin boys to men so old lifting a tea cup was their version of a day's workout, was illuminated with a new sense of significance. But today, his new car had been stolen, and the police were uninterested in helping. The police have not changed much since Mubarak was forced out. They sort of disappeared for a while, when the January Revolution was at its fullest and best, but that moment, like the peak blossom of the rose, is brief, and the petals drift almost imperceptibly to the earth. The police are

back; they've stepped out of the shadows. The revolution seems to have stalled. The people are still hungry, for bread and for a change in governmental responsiveness. The colors have dulled. The air is polluted. Grumbling fills the teahouses instead of laughter. Israelis are shooting across the borders of the Sinai. There is talk about banning bikinis from the sea resorts that provide the last vestiges of tourist dollars.

When I was there early in summer, there was such jubilation everywhere.