GO DOWN MOSES, GO ALL THE WAY DOWN!

This is no age for a prophet. Can't be. Or maybe it is just that I feel so alone. Back then, in the Age of Prophets, they were multiple, the one prophet was baptizing the other, it was like a Prophets League, they were fighting, denouncing and renouncing each other, the way from fisherman to fame was just one little step, one day you'd be the carpenters illegitimate child and the next day the son of God. I have a son, but no Father. I just wake up in the morning unseen and unwanted by the Egyptian peoples in the flea-crowded bed of the windowless Room no. 5. Un-called-for I get out of bed and put on my grey suit and tie and pick up my flag and knock on the door of the film crew and wait for her to get ready, and against all odds and the word and law of the Egyptian authorities I just go on walking the Flag of the New World Order, the Flag of Friendship, the Flag of Wonder, through Cairo. And for every step I take my way is getting heavier, step by step my legs are being filled up with lead, no doubt they have poisoned me, hired some Russian agent who behind my back or right in front of my face and gaze have filled my Foul-Felfela with plutonium, another heavy metal, heavier even than lead. But in spite of all that, in spite of ban, lead and plutonium I go on, I stand up and pick up my flag and go on walking on through the days and nights of this world, through suburbs suffocating in noise, garbage, human stools and exhaust fumes.  

Today we picked up the red thread of our history in the district of Shubra, or Rud El Farag, or maybe it was the El Wayli. In a seemingly nameless side alley of a side alley the film team took shelter in a gateway while I proceeded a few hundreds of meters down the alley. I stopped under the remains of a suffocated tree and pulled out the flag of my bag watched over by a sweaty unwashed young man leaning out of his window in a dirty-white sleeveless T-shirt smoking like the eternal image of the unemployed and lost generation of the world. His gaze was a misty blend of indifference, suspicion and loathing. I raised the flag and went out into the street and resumed the heroic walk through the land of Egypt, as always smiling, waving my free left hand and crying out "Salaam!" and "Alaam el-Sadaka!" But something had changed. Or maybe it was just the time of day or just this particular street. Three young men walking by, old crooked women in black, two young mothers, children, workers, everyone looked at me, but no one smiled, no one greeted me. They just looked. At the end of the alley I turned my head and saw a sudden crowd of men, young and grown-ups, dragging the film crew further into the darkness of the gateway. I stopped, and for a moment I just stood there, the flag hanging like a fainted law on its fishing rod, wondering what a prophet of the old age would do when one of his apostles was suddenly swallowed up by the angry mob. I wondered. And while I wondered time passed, and suddenly the film crew reappeared from the darkness of the gateway, no longer that young, on the contrary, older, blander than before. And behind her the mob of men had stopped in the gateway, hate hazing from their eyes. – They forced me to erase the recording, she said. – Who? I said looking at the men still looking at us, - are they some kind of plain-clothed agents? – No, she said, - I don't think so, it is just the people living here in this street. – But why? I said, - why?

Why would they stop us, why force us to erase the recordings of a stranger, but friendly smiling man walking a white flag through their street, if not out of fear. Not fear of us, of course, but fear of the ones who fear, the ever-present state, the plain-clothed agents oozing through the crowd of plain citizens. The supreme power of a police state is not the hundreds of thousands of white and black and sand-colored police officers, it is not the hundreds of thousands of plain-clothed agents of the National Security, no, the supreme power of the land of Egypt is the people itself having slowly been turned into and grown up to be their own secret agents, each citizen watching over himself and his neighbors and the casual strangers passing through his street, each citizen being his or her own censor, censuring himself and his neighbor and the casual stranger filming another stranger carrying an enigmatic but soft, white and innocent flag through the street.      

It was a blind alley, another dead end. But I had to go on. My legs were heavier than ever before. I reached the main road passing through the district of Rud El Farag, or El Wayli, or maybe it was the El Qubba, another countless-lane artery gray with pollution and noise, a roar of trucks and rustbodies stuck in this dead end of civilization. Behind the smog a low sun was sinking faintly orange into the horizon of garbage and ruins. Beyond hope or just comatose as I was, instead of crossing the main road, I just started walking down alongside it. And of course it was endless, a straight line drawn by an indifferent god and attended by thousands and thousands of the same huge greybrown concrete housing blocks. It was the straight line of hell: coming from nowhere and leading me nowhere. I walked along ruined concrete walls and sheet metal fences, a sudden withered garden grey from suffocating and dust. To my other side an endless procession of old trucks, excavators, load tractors and bulldozers had come to a permanent halt, their shovels resting heavy in the fainted garbage and dust. With every breath I took another part of my brain expired, my lungs and flag turning grey. At the end of a long crumbled concrete wall a gate suddenly opened into a huge yard. An old billboard showed fainted signs of car repair shop. Without hesitation, as if it was the gate to heaven suddenly and in the very last moment opening up to let me pass out of the old world, I entered, still carrying the flag. Just inside the gate a small group of people were gathered, dirt-poor, dressed in rags, but not like repair shop workers, rather like peasants, shepherds from the age of prophets. Jesus! I thought as I greeted them, - Salaam alekhem! and passed by them into paradise: It wasn't paradise, it wasn't even a car repair shop, it was a field, but a field without crops or grass, just a dark brown ground in the abyss between huge twenty store housing blocks. And on or in this dry brown piece of no man's land a small herd of scrawny cattle and sheep and goats was hovering, slowly turning their dead eyes towards me as I walked by and came to a halt in front of a wall. The End. Once again. From an opening in the building above me a man leaned out and cried something in that grating guttural voice of the Egyptian subordinate. I looked up, smiled, or at least tried to. – Alaam el-Sadaka, I mumbled. He spat. I turned around and looked at the small group of peasants or shepherds - three boys with shepherds sticks, a man and a women, an old crooked couple - still standing at the gate like a medieval painting looking at me. I waved my hand. They looked. From the gap in the building above me the man growled once again and spat. I turned to the cattle, the smogcolored sheep and the two goats standing in the dried ditch watching me without a sound. I raised my hand towards them and waved it, - Salaam, I mumbled, I am your prophet. And then I resumed walking, passed the small group of peasants, went through the gate and back out in hell.