Caught in the Tide

The guy two cars in front of us swerved and then suddenly there was an old man in the road, bewildered and scared. The car in front jinked left, right, left. The old man moved, too, but in the same direction each time, a macabre mirror-dance with an inevitable finale. His hands were held up in supplication, or rejection, as the car hit him and then suddenly he was high in the air, a ridiculous flight.

He landed next to us, then was behind us as we lurched to a halt. I got out of the car, the old man sitting in the road, his bloody head in his hands, but I was transfixed by the realisation that there was little I could do, here in the middle of the dusty road off the Alex highway. There were men running everywhere and a group of four lifted the old man from the road as I stood, useless and bewildered. He was stiff in his sitting position as they lifted him and I realised with a shock that I had seen this position before, a dead old beggar being lifted out of the gutter of the covered souk in Halab. Sometimes Cairo reminds me of Halab in its relentless, remorseless movement of people and goods in the pursuit of marginal gain. And this old man reminded me of that old man, a victim of the tide.

His sandals were still in the road, being run over by passing cars, lorries and buses filled with curious faces pressed to the windows. Our driver and I darted into the traffic to get them back, I saw the old man’s keys, two of them tied together on a keyring with a see-through plastic die on the fob and walked out to get them. I handed the keys to one of the men huddled around the old man, sitting by the road in his dusty kandoura, a horrific wound in his forehead where he’d smashed it into the corner of the car window, I remember thinking stupidly how there was remarkably little blood, although his face was streaked with red. They were giving him water and then a traffic cop turned up. There was nothing more we could do, so we drove off: three silent people in a car together with nothing to say.