Eighteen Days of Spring in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

of French toast she made with love lodged in my windpipe. And then I stop telling myself stories.
    Looking over at my laptop, I decide to read and grab a book from under my bed. The slow internet can wait. Puffing myself up to a more comfortable position, I place the plate next to me and open the book.
    I stayed like that for over an hour. Leisurely reading. One of the great things about literature is that you have to read fiction for your studies, giving you the perfect excuse every time. ‘Why are you reading romantic nonsense Sophia?’ ‘It’s for my studies, baba.’ ‘Oh, well … OK carry on.’
    At some point I hear a noise coming from the open living area. My father is standing there inspecting the furniture like he has just walked into the wrong house.
    ‘Baba?’ I ask, confused.
    ‘Where’s your mother?’ he asks with an urgency that concerns me. I stand up from my leaning position against the wall. ‘She took Salem to school and then went to work,’ I answer. It’s Thursday, he knows this, it happens every day except Friday and Saturday.
    He looks at me, taking in my pyjamas and book in hand. He comes over to me, placing his hand on my cheek and says ‘Oh OK, nothing’s wrong. I am popping out and you just stay here. Don’t go out, just stay at home.’ With this he pats my cheek one more time and walks towards the door.
    After he leaves I almost run to my laptop to switch it on. Now I am not an idiot. I know my family well enough to know that if nothing was wrong, he would scream at me not to go out if he didn’t want me to. It would be an order, one that my mother might be able to soften later, but an order nonetheless. The fact that he tried to break it to me gently that nothing was wrong means clearly there is something wrong.
    Grabbing my laptop and taking it back to the bed, I turn it on. And there it is.
    The Day of Rage.
    The wording was aggressive. A whole day of rage. Is it uncontrolled rage? Lashing out rage? Or is it suppressed rage? Rage ready to blow? The ambiguity was in some ways a direct threat.
    And the date selected could not have been more perfect. Tuesday the 25th of January, the day the nation commemorates its police force, celebrates their duty and honours them. Egyptians from Alexandria to Aswan were planning to take to the streets to protest against that very same force, the thugs of the establishment. It was, in fact, genius.
    People had been talking about such a day for a long time. It had been bubbling, but lots of things had been bubbling.Knowing which had bubbled over and which had simmered down was not easy. We had heard students were organising themselves, teachers, nurses and the average man, woman and child on the street, but no one actually displayed any rage to my knowledge. And now the whole country was going to do just that, bare its teeth, show its rage, fight not flee on January 25th. Five days from now.

VI
A self-education
    I have often looked back and wondered if I really was that uninformed. I knew most of the facts already, but felt totally detached from the sentiment. Was I really so ambivalent to the world around me and so out of touch with the feeling rising on the streets? How could I have gone about my daily life so detached from everyone else’s?
    Watching the revolution unfold on your television screen from a distant place it is easy to think everyone in Cairo was there, that not a household didn’t take to the streets. It’s true, we were all part of it in some way. But for many people life continued as normal. There were disruptions to normality, but it is impossible to live a day in Cairo without something being disrupted. It’s impossible to execute a plan to the detail because something unexpected will come along and disrupt it, jumble the order of your timeline so you have to do the first thing last and the last thing first. You have to be comfortable with ambiguity to live in Cairo and to live through a revolution.
    That is not an excuse