Egyptian dispatch: Feb. 11, 2013

I receive the terrible news about Arda's death on Thursday morning when I arrive at work and by the evening Nina, my daughter, is back home from Minneapolis. We have to wait until early Saturday for USPS to deliver her US passport that her roommate had sent overnight. We headed straight to a travel agency to book tickets. Forty-five minutes later we were in the airport — Chicago, Munich and Cairo. By Sunday evening we are in Heliopolis with friends of her family planning what needs to be done in the coming days. We meet with the family lawyer and strategies are planned, stories are concocted which for various reasons I can't make public here. I remark that it seems like we are in a novel by Naguib Mahfouz. Nina and I have already noted how our predicament resembles a film by Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited). We go out into the night to buy mobile phones. Later we are driven to Arda's parent's apartment and the new graffiti on the palace walls has not been painted over unlike during my earlier visit. We enter the apartment — it's so empty, in every sense of the word. We discover two rooms that are locked that have important documents that we need, and since we cannot find the keys I spend hours trying to find a screwdriver to dismantle the door locks, but to no avail. 

It's now 5am on Monday morning and the street outside is quiet. We have a driver coming at 9am to take us to the US embassy to start doing the paper work we need to claim her body. A general strike is planned today as it's the anniversary of the day Mubarak resigned from office. The embassy is just off Tahrir square and when we called them last night they instructed us to contact them before we leave in the morning to find out what is happening in the street. The man at the end of the line says that things here change every 5 minutes. In our grief our plans have changed from our first responses — we want now to bring Arda back home and at Spring break scatter her ashes somewhere in the Bay Area, as San Francisco was the place she loved most and it was her real home. Neither of us can bear the thought of leaving her in the family crypt in the Armenian cemetery in Cairo. Before we left home I found an old US passport of her's that I've carried in my back pocket ever since, its some kind of talisman that I've needed to carry with me as we make this journey. The photo is from 1985 and she looks so beautiful. Our grief hits us both in waves at unexpected times.