I felt anxious as I walked around the city. I was constantly watching my step. Not a gesture, not a look, not a thought out of place. I wandered past the Ministry of Interior Affairs, the headquarters of the Mukhabarat where my father in his time had been a frequent visitor; this was where they had made his fake papers for him, this was where they had required certain favours in exchange for the hospitality afforded him by King Farouk and later by Nasser. What else could they have asked him to do but infiltrate European circles in Cairo, decode secret Nazi documents bought on the black market, develop some sort of chemical weapon and later train Algerian revolutionaries in some anonymous building in the city? I quickly realised I had been spotted – the chaouchs were making a pincer movement, indestructible old bangers would suddenly break down nearby, choufs would diligently pretend to read their newspaper as they watched me. I slipped away just in time. Many things have changed here since 1945 – the curtains that hang on the windows, the official cars, the suits worn by the civil servants, the complaints of the orderlies, the sound of the sirens – what has not changed is the atmosphere. Hans Schiller, SS officer, would have felt at home here. Then I remembered that the war never really ended in Egypt – if the Egyptians weren’t starting a war, someone else was: the wars against the Mamelukes, the Turks, the king, against the British and the French, the war against American imperialism, the wars with Israel, the wars against Islamic terrorists, against the Copts, against the Kafirs, the war against the Great Satan and, worst of all, the war they waged against their own people. Having waged all these wars, there was only one thing to do – make peace with itself, return to the happiness of yesteryear, to the Great Egypt, serene, eternal.