Episode
I – An Olympic flare
Haflatoun is back and, caught between delusion and general confusion, he resumes his quest on the path to wisdom. In this episode, the self-declared philosopher prince accepts a mission to Athens in search of an old flame.
As retold to Khaled Diab
Date: 23 August
2004
Place: Bathroom
Time: 10:30
There’s a
thin line between being a thinker and a stinker, I realised as the curried veal
I ate last night plopped into the murky depths below. The ensuing gas leak
temporarily interrupted my train of thought just as I was about to make an
earth-shattering discovery. I am constantly amazed by how whimsical genius can
be and how human progress can be held up by a little fart – and I am not being
political here.
The toilet is
my philosophical nerve centre – and human intelligence may, indeed, reside
somewhere in the lower intestine – but it has served me badly today. Unable to
separate the sublime from the slime, I was on the verge of calling it a day
when my loo-side fax machine started churning out an encrypted message.
The
wall-mounted apparatus spun out the message. Printed on specially designed
biodegradable paper disguised cunningly as a toilet roll, the secret
correspondence would decompose in a matter of minutes. In a race against
nature’s clock, I speed read. It was from Eye, I gasped. It turned out that the
man – if he is that – whom so few have seen wanted an audience with me. I had not
a moment to lose to rid myself of the message. To be extra environmentally
friendly, I decided to wipe my lumbar regions with it before I flushed it down
the toilet, where not even the sewer rats would be able to decipher its
contents.
Haflata: Talking
drivel Aflatoun: Plato Haflatoun: Drivelling Plato
Outside
my building, an Eye of Horus stared at me off the side of a golden limousine
which – like Ra’s sun barque – was
about to take me west across the city in pursuit of the setting sun. “Mr
Haflatoun, will you come with us, please?” asked two men in dark suits and
earpieces as they converge on either side of me, weapons raised like Seth and
Mehen.
So, did that
make me Apep? No, no – I am neither a crocodile, nor am I the spirit of evil or
destruction.
No, they were
simply the Eye’s heavies and I was their warmly embraced ‘guest’. Feeling hard
pressed to object, I wheezed out my assent. No matter where you are in the
world, it seems that there is a certain dress code for security outfits which
does nothing to tame their brawn or make them appear less intimidating,
particularly when one is wedged between them in the backseat of a car. As we
drove off, I wondered to myself whether this bodyguard chic complied with some
underground, unwritten rulebook, or was there some sort of glossy fashion
magazine called Avant-Guard targeted at this bulging market.
Date: 23 August
2004
Place: The Eye’s secret
hideout
Time: 13:00
Behind a
non-descript perfume shop-front in Nazlet el-Saman, the village at the foot of
the Sphinx, sat a secret labyrinth of tunnels. Inside one chamber, on a large
sandstone wall, was another enormous Eye of Horus. On the floor sat a large
group of people reciting incomprehensible incantations.
“What am I
and who are you?” the Eye asked with practiced disdain.
“You are our
Eye and we are your pupils. We cannot see without you,” they boomed together.
Jolted by
this incredible show of blind obedience, I was to be even more shocked when the
crowd dispersed. Every face that passed me was immediately recognisable – there
was one who I could’ve sworn was supposed to be part of a scientology sect,
another who’d reputedly joined the Kabbalah, a handful of rumoured freemasons.
Once the
chamber had emptied out, the Eye on the wall popped out of its slot to reveal a
hidden doorway. “You may enter,” my guardians informed me.
My eyes took
a few moments to adjust to the gloom inside the tomb-like room. “Haflatoun,”
boomed the voice of the Eye. “Sit down, my pupil.”
“I am not
your pupil,” I replied defiantly. A heavy pause hung over the darkened chamber,
and I could hear an odd scratching noise.
“Kneel before
me as my follower and disciple!”
“I bow down
before no man.” Pause… Scratch… I began to sweat nervously.
“Eye/I is not
a man... I/Eye am an EYE/I.”
Confused by
the morphology of this bizarre sentence, I paused to figure out its
significance. “Do you mean that you are a massive, disembodied ego?” A louder,
more aggressive scratch…
“I am the
all-seeing Eye of Horus and you shall obey me, you mortal moron!”
“Show your
face,” I challenged the Eye.
“Must I
repeat myself? I am an eye. I have no face.”
Something
about the scratching sound was eerily familiar. I knew I had heard it somewhere
before. “Rehab, is that you?”
This was not
his given name but his unfortunate story earned him this title. Ehab, as his
parents had named him, knew tragedy from an early age. Desperate to break out
of the ‘feminine’ mould her own parents had trapped her in, his mother
suggested to her conservative fez-topped and moustachioed husband that they go
on an African safari. Being an avid hunter of the ancien régime type, he leapt
at the chance of bagging himself some trophies. In a cunning bid to untie
herself from the bonds of patriarchal wedlock and to give vent to her budding
feminism, she packed nothing but blanks in her spouse’s bag. Sadly, owing to a
semantic confusion on her part, the man-eating tiger not only devoured her
husband but also dined on her tender meat. This left poor baby Ehab an orphan.
Unable to forgive his mother, his father’s family – into whose care he went –
never accepted him as one of their own, and he spent his formative years living
in emotional oblivion.
At
university, Ehab discovered experimental art, deconstructive drugs, and a
penchant for weighty waffle. Craving recognition and approval, the young
aspirant found his way into television and hosted a hard-hitting and
controversial art programme that shook up the staid establishment at the public
broadcaster. He was able to pass off his drugged indifference as trademark
petulance and foolhardiness to an audience hungry for television with bite.
After several
years in the limelight, he woke up one morning and realised that his memories
of his success were a hazy collection of jittery images, and they were fading
fast. This time, Ehab resolved to become Re-hab. A few days of unaccustomed
lucidity began to cause major confusion to his system. Although he could now
see the edges more clearly, he was losing his edge. Painfully aware of the
millions of eyes cast in his direction, he was no longer cutting into his
guests with the same brand of venom.
Faced with
plummeting ratings, his director went against his own earlier advice and urged
him to bring his old self back. Deciding that Lucy was easier than Lucidity to
handle, Rehab rushed off to buy her some diamonds. On his way to the famous
Batnya slum district of Cairo, he flipped his low-rider Porsche in deep ditch
on a deserted back street under the 6th October flyover.
Fortunately,
the bang on the head he received did not cause any memory loss. Sadly, he did lose
his ability to understand the spoken word, although he could still hear it –
and read and write perfectly. Diagnosed with chronic word deafness, he was
able, with the help of a therapist, to develop a technique to overcome his
unusual condition: he wrote down what he heard and read it to himself. Of
course, such a technique was not of much use on a heated debating programme,
and his faltering career took a nosedive from which it didn’t recover.
“So, you’ve
switched from gullible viewers to gullible stars in your twilight years?” I
asked him. “Didn’t think anyone really bought into this freemasonry rubbish.”
He jotted down what he heard frantically and read it.
“Freemasons?
How dare you?” he countered. “In Ancient Egypt, masons were only skilled artisans,
it is the scribes and clergy who wielded the real power. This, here, is a
proper cult steeped in the proper age-old fashion.”
Taking the
notebook from him: “Oh, forgive me for the misunderstanding,” I wrote
mockingly. “Anyway, why have you called me here?”
“I want you
to bring the Olympic torch to Cairo,” he said dramatically.
“The one in Athens?” my pen quizzed.
“Yes, for 2016.”
“That’s a generous deadline. Do you think we
can keep that little thing burning for so long?”
“I’m speaking figuratively. I want you to find
a way of bringing the Olympic games to Egypt, especially after what happened
with the World Cup.”
“Let’s not turn a kick in the footballs from
FIFA into a tragedy of Olympian proportions,” I pen ominously.
“Greece got it for being ‘the cradle of Western
civilisation’. Well, who provided the mother’s milk, I ask you?”
Luckily, Ehab, or The Eye, as he now liked to
be called, had had the foresight to realise that this would not be an easy
argument to win and so he’d brought along a very thick notebook. Aside from not
trusting him, I had numerous ethical and practical reservations against getting
involved in this enterprise.
It’s true that the Olympics do bring a country
prestige and, some might argue, that, over the long-term, they also make
economic sense. In Barcelona, I had seen what happened to these investments in
the city’s Olympic Village. What use to local athletes and kids is the
crumbling Olympic swimming pool? If it’s grand ruins we’re looking for, Egypt
has plenty of world class ones of her own, we don’t need to build inferior
modern imitations.
Cunning city officials now justify the massive
investments in terms of the recyclability of the facilities. The Athenians –
being old hands at hosting the games – have taken this a step further by
building a metro, improving the roads, and constructing reusable accommodation.
But I say why not cut out the middleman and just pump all that money straight
into what citizens really need. We should clean up the grime before we look for
the sublime.
But glory – and I suspect massive profits – is
what The Eye was after. Unable to win the rational debate, he changed tactics,
playing the family chord. “Haflatoun, think what your ancestors would say, if
you didn’t go after the Olympic flame?” he urged.
Indeed, my ancestry does bridge the ancient
world. I can trace one branch of my family tree right back to Aflatoun (Plato)
and Herodotus who, according to his unauthorised biography, was totally bowled
over by the local talent during his travels through Egypt. He was enthralled by
the assertive, stylish, worldwise young urbanites of Heliopolis and Memphis.
While women back home were covered in veils and not allowed into public places,
young Egyptian ladies went around in revealing outfits, wore eye-turning
makeup, managed careers, and held high office. The Greek chronicler is rumoured
to have fallen in love with a beautiful female Memphian scribe with whom he
travelled the known world. However, I know for a fact that this is no rumour
because that woman, Hagar was her name, nurtures one root of my family tree.
Ahmose (Amasis, in Greek), the last great Egyptian king, after whose son Egypt
would fall into foreign control for over two millennia, fed another root.
Cleopatra and Mark Anthony’s bastard son provided some Ptolemaic-Roman
fertiliser for my ancestral soil.
Before he can sway me, I remind Ehab that there
is the more practical obstacle of space. Cairo is one of the most densely
populated metropolises in the world. The city is not only spreading its
tentacles to the surrounding countryside and desert, it’s left ground level and
is heading skyward, as well as digging down slowly towards the Earth’s mantle.
It has sacrificed almost every green space within its borders to the gods of
Urbania.
“Ahh, that’s the easy bit,” he beamed. “We’ll
just declare a public holiday for the duration of the games and send half the
city’s population off to Alexandria and the North Coast at government expense.
That’s the cheapest solution, and it’d be good for the national psyche.”
“But wouldn’t you need the sea for sailing and
the all-popular beach volleyball?”
“We can pack them off to the empty satellite
cities in the desert.”
Ahh, the folly of narcissism, I thought to
myself. “You’re mad,” I diagnose in a semi-illegible doctor’s scrawl. “I won’t
do it.”
“Luna is in Athens. Don’t you want to see her?”
he asked deviously. Could it be that, after all these years, the moon of my
life is shining in Greece.
“LUNA! Are you sure?”
“Yeah, she was sighted there by several of my
eyes.”
Date: 24 August 2004
Place: Siwa Oasis
Time: 06:30
Needing time to think, I headed off to the Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert to consult with my personal oracle. Um Uref, who had started off by reading tea leaves and coffee ground, had, through hard graft, seen her fortunes rise in the fortune-telling stakes and had left the confining spaces of Cairo for some fresh oasis air. Normally, I would’ve made the trek out to see her by camel to put myself into a properly reflective mood. But this time I had no time to lose and went by 4x4. I found her sitting on the dusty street outside the temple of Amum – built by Ahmose, it was where the oracle consulted by Alexander the Great was reputed to reside.
“Should I go to Athens?” I asked her in the
local Berber tongue she had adopted.
“It is your destiny,” she spluttered through
the funny smelling incense smoke that was turning my head quite light. “You
must look your fate in the eye and not blink. If you wish to shape events, then
you have to go.”
How did she know about the Eye? Um Uref must
possess true foresight. Indeed, I agreed, I had to go to Athens and sabotage
The Eye’s plot. But I was filled with foreboding when he informed me that my
contact point would be the beautiful Pandora, who’d left a legion of broken men
with nothing but hope and caused me nothing but trouble in a distant past.
ã2004 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.