doorman in court today

I saw my neighbor earlier today, and she said it wasn’t her place that was broken into, but the one directly upstairs from me. This happened while I was in Amsterdam earlier in the month, and I’m lucky it wasn’t me (until having some reinforcement repairs done on Saturday, I had the flimsiest front door imaginable).

Whoever did it tried to make it look like entry was through the rear door, but that’s just a filthy stairwell for garbage removal that none of us ever use: my neighbor said she’s been living here for 30 years and doesn’t even know where that stairwell leads (nor do I; it looks like it goes straight down to hell itself).

In any case, our doorman Alaa stands accused, and is in court today. My neighbor said she’s absolutely sure he did it, though I don’t know if she’s heard the evidence or if that’s just speculation.

She said he likely faces 7 years of prison, a long time to serve under prison conditions here.

As I’ve said, he’s been one of my least favorite doormen in Cairo all along. There was nothing threatening about him, but he always had a certain air of sneaky opportunism that made me uncomfortable, a far cry from our fantastic previous doorman.

My neighbor says everyone in the building had similar feelings about him. And this is one issue we all go back and forth with over the course of a lifetime– to what extent do we trust our bad initial feelings about certain people? In this case my uneasy feeling (and everyone else’s) about him probably turned to be correct. In other cases, we might decide we were reading way too much into those initial negative vibes.

But back to the doorman… I’ll always be a bit sad when I remember the enthusiasm that came over him immediately after the Revolution. He installed a big Egyptian flag next to his chair in front of the building and seemed really proud of it. Young guy, probably 23 or so.

If he did break into the neighbor’s place upstairs, then he made a huge mistake. The doorman is always the first suspect in any Cairo break-in (the profession exists precisely to prevent such incidents), and the police generally give them pretty rough handling when trying to figure out if they were the guilty parties.

In any case, I don’t wish anyone 7 years in prison, despite having never liked this guy much. Someone told me that it’s all military trials these days, hence the incredible speed of it in a country where nothing usually happens very fast (except revolutions, apparently).

I don’t remember exactly when Alaa started on the job, but I think it was some time around late May, early June last year. For some reason our doormen in this building seem to rotate every half-year or year or so. I moved into this place in December 2008, and I think we’ve had 4 doormen during that period.