An Imperium of the Heart

by Joel Rice

There is some panic, the Associated Press reports, in Cairo. Despite months of warning, eradication teams are unable to prevent locusts from making landfall in the city. This is the first infestation in 30 years.

In rural areas, farmers set tires on fire to deter the swarms.

The locusts beam in the gray light of the winter day, banging into windows and dropping on cars. Residents rush home to shutter apartment windows.


John looks up from his computer.


Interviewer: Do you feel afraid of open spaces, or driving, or being on buses, subways, and so forth?
John: They’re carried with the winds. An edict has been issued stating they can be eaten.


Locusts pass by the building, a few land on the towels he has left to dry on the balcony. The call to prayer mingles with the songs of his computer.

His mother has sent him a guide to Christian dating; it now rests on the bureau. He is concerned that if his background check is approved—he wants to become a diplomat, like his father, once ambassador to Iraq, back in the days of the Shah—his bachelorhood will be prolonged indefinitely.


Born in Baghdad, raised in Bloomington, Indiana, where his father retired to teach, John’s favorite motion picture is Breaking Away—filmed in Bloomington.
He has brown hair, which he parts to the side. His cholesterol is higher than it should be, but that is his only health problem.

He has been waiting for six months for a security clearance from State. The clearance, he knows, can take as long as a year. A Foreign Service officer must choose one of five possible cones, as the five career tracks—Management Affairs, Consular Affairs, Economic Affairs, Political Affairs, Public Diplomacy—are called. John has chosen Political Affairs.


While he waits, he immerses himself in Arabic culture. For £600 Egyptian, the equivalent of $100 U.S., he rents an apartment two doors down from the Interior Ministry, the center of the state apparatus, with all its electronic data, funds, deputies, operatives, surveillances, and interrogations.


In a city where pollution degrades the exteriors of almost all structures, the ministry stands pristinely apart. From behind chest-high barricades lining the perimeter, black-helmeted soldiers stand with their fingers on the triggers of mounted machine guns. They scan the high volumes of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, a street scene of old and new. Vendors offer religious audiocassettes in stalls. Sheep and oxen herd through the intersection. Shopkeepers push computer monitors on handcarts.


Attired in gray suits, holding walkie-talkies, state personnel stand in the street, some holding the leashes of German Shepherds. The dogs inspect all entering vehicles. Palm trees taller then the ministry stand along the courtyard. Egypt’s emblem is mounted in black on the northern wall—a gold eagle, wings outstretched, its talons holding a scroll bearing the name of the country in Arabic. A gray radio tower rises in the southwest corner.


There’s a rubber-duck race on the Nile, sponsored by the British Council, to promote the speaking of English. Roped off in the middle of the river, two Egyptians wearing robes launch two dozen yellow rubber ducks. On the bank, four Englishmen in T-shirts speak in hushed tones. Behind them, across the busy avenue, stand green apartments, their white awnings engrimed.

The ducks spin in circles. The riverbank casts a wide afternoon shadow.

At dinner, a journalist says Egyptians were paddling out and picking up rubber ducks.


John spends much of his day at his computer. It rests on a white table-scarf in his living room. On the wall hangs a needlepoint of a pastoral scene: a white-wigged gentleman against green foliage.

John listens to Arabic lessons on audiocassette tapes or practices improving his Arabic public speaking. White curtains mask the balcony’s window. He faces his camcorder. Wearing a sports coat, he delivers a practice presentation titled “Embassy Car Bomb.”


Below the fifth-floor apartment, cacophonous blue taxis stream. Across the street is the Banque Du Caire, its gold letters worn. A male Cairean pedals a bicycle in chaotic traffic, balancing a long pan of pita bread on his head; a bale of mint is thatched to the bike’s rear fender. Motorcycles, passengers in the sidecars, weave among donkey-pulled carts. The traffic lights do not function. For public consumption, clay jars of water sit beneath municipal trees. Cow carcasses hang from hooks in doorways. Kittens crawl along the gutter. AAAAAAAAAAllahu Akbar Allahu Akbar dilates across the city in a prerecorded drone that rises and envelops roofs and satellite dishes.


John has a job. He studies open news sources and files a report on risk factors in Egypt for a private security company headquartered in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. These reports are of use to corporate entities with financial interests in Egypt (the second largest recipient of U.S. aid and a close U.S. ally). His most recent report ends: In an emergency, implement plans for an evacuation.


John views television as a news source. An Arabic news program shows a diminutive replica of the Statue of Liberty, her face replaced by a skull. (Ersatz) blood rains down upon her head and shoulders.

A list of nation-states scrolls down the center of the screen.


The light is heavy in Al-Gamaliya, where the Al-Azhar Mosque was established in 972. Al-Azhar translates as “the most blooming” or “the most shining.” Across from the mosque gray, wet tripe lies curled in a metal bowl. Flies, flies, flies.


A young woman passes in a green “camouflage” veil.


...skull stickers on the windows of all the blue cabs.


John buys his food (white bread, tuna) at a supermarket—it’s less expensive than eating out and food in Egypt is often cooked with excessive grease. His “dream” is to marry an Arab.


Summer Said is a 21-year-old Egyptian woman popular with the American community. She is a journalist of sorts. She has just started smoking.

On a July afternoon, she sits in the terrace café of a hotel. Her ankle is wrapped with ice under her black pant leg. She injured herself riding a horse at the pyramids.

An abstract mosaic decorates the wall behind her.

Local men pull from shishas. Apple-scented smoke wafts through the outdoor seating area.


Interviewer: Did you see the video?

Said: I laughed. What else can you do? I love Hawthorne. I love the Puritans. They want their freedom, and all they do is build prisons and graves. It reminds me of Egypt.


At this café, frequented by left-wing Egyptians and Westerners, an American, a friend of John’s from Princeton, teaches Summer Said a complicated hand gesture that signifies cunnilingus. When she becomes aware of the gesture’s lewd meaning, she slaps the American repeatedly. The Egyptian men at nearby tables stop eating and stare. The restaurant becomes quiet.

Soon the American is sitting alone, smoking a cigarette. Breaking the silence, an American psychologist, employed by the university, admonishes him: You can’t make a scene here the way you can in New York.

John takes a taxi through Al Tahir Square on an errand to buy a new air conditioner. While riding in the backseat, he speaks of Princeton University, also his father’s alma mater.


Cabdriver: Who do you prefer, Batman or the Superman?

As the taxi crosses Tali Taub Square, demonstrators come into view. Some individuals drop sheets of plate glass onto the heads of Intelligence Service agents and riot police. The former, in gray suits and white helmets, bound up to the balcony of the Allah Akbar Mosque, and, wielding two-by-fours, proceed to beat the persons responsible.


John: ...so they were held up in Nassau Hall when a cannonball crashed through the wall decapitating the portrait of King George II...and the British surrendered because they were superstitious.

Interviewer: Where?

John: At Princeton.

Computer: You said there would be snow on Christmas...

Night. Downtown Cairo. At dinner, John orders pigeon. The head, with its shrunken, wrinkled black eyes, hangs off the plate. He lifts the pigeon’s neck with his index finger and thumb.

Just beyond the restaurant terrace, soldiers with flak jackets and riot helmets are standing on the cement median.

A waiter passes with a tray of fried sparrows.


John: My boss can be kind of dirty. [John hangs his head sheepishly and smiles.] He asked me where I thought an effective terror strike might be these days. I told him the Washington Beltway. In a snowstorm. No, he said, they want tactical reliability. A snowstorm is too unreliable.