Once Upon a Revolution Read Online Free Page B

center, swallowing the once-isolated suburbs. Along the grand avenues radiating from Tahrir Square, the art deco façades crumbled while the sidewalks, no longer graced with municipal maintenance, buckled and cracked. With nowhere else to channel people, government planners turned to the vast desert plateau southeast of Cairo. The royal family had built its summer dwelling there in the village of Helwan because of the fair breeze. The British had added an observatory. But Cairo was growing too quickly to leave this wondrous escarpment unmolested. Helwan became a factory zone, and around it sprang up military bases, worker hostels, and, finally, subdivisions for the lower middle class. One of these was called Wadi Hof, an inhospitable triangular spit of land between a highway, an army camp, and a factory. It seemed at the end of the earth, but in Wadi Hof’s fresh air and open vista, the Kamels saw their chance. They purchased Plot 56 on Street 32 in the empty new subdivision. A fifteen-minute walk led to a train track, and from there one could ride to downtown Cairo in an hour. With unbelievable speed, roads were paved, empty spaces filled in, and families like the Kamels, year by year, added floorsto their homes until they reached the new development’s zoning limit of five. This was what passed as achieving the middle-class dream. The Kamels planted an olive tree and a grape arbor in the backyard, which was just large enough for a dozen children to play tag.
    Baby Basem had been conceived in a time of faltering expectations. By the time he’d learned to walk, his parents had scaled down their hopes. They would build their home in the desert, and they would send their kids to school, but they no longer believed that Cairo would join Paris and London among world capitals, or that their sons were destined to enjoy the same upward mobility their parents had.

    In order to maintain his own family in Cairo, Basem’s father had to leave them behind in Helwan and depart once more to Saudi Arabia. He worked abroad in Jeddah for a second decade to pay for the house in Wadi Hof. It was a common trajectory for millions of Egyptians of all classes. As he grew older, Basem also mimicked his father’s studious avoidance of public life. It was, after all, the harmless and well-intentioned act of joining the Boy Scouts that had turned Mohamed Kamel into a political prisoner; the lesson was that no act was too insignificant to avoid. Basem steered clear of the student union at school.
    In 1981 President Anwar Sadat was assassinated live on television during a ceremony commemorating the October 1973 war against Israel. Hosni Mubarak had been standing beside the president. He was immediately sworn in to succeed Sadat, still spattered with his blood. Steady, handsome, and not particularly bright, Mubarak seemed at first the perfect antidote to three decades of larger-than-life dictators. Nasser had sculpted a new Egypt, which Sadat had shoved into the age of capitalism. Perhaps Mubarak, a methodical former air force general, could offer a respite so that Egyptians could catch their breath.
    In the Kamel household, the violent transfer of power—the last that Egypt would witness for three decades—was observed mostly by an absence of remark. The television stayed on after the footage of murder and pandemonium, but this was authoritarian state broadcasting, not latter-day cable; instead of news coverage, the government played a loopof patriotic music, and announced a mourning period. “No school for a week!” Basem exulted. No further political implications were discussed.
    In the popular imagination, Mubarak was a provincial buffoon, cautious and devoid of ideology. In the quintessential joke, Mubarak’s presidential limo reaches an intersection.
    â€œWhich way shall we go, sir?” the driver inquires.
    â€œWhich way would Nasser have turned?” Mubarak asks.
    â€œAlways left,” comes the