Fluffy Kittens: Egypt Air Flight 985

How strange and wonderful the little things become during wartime.

I left Cairo last week to make my bi-annual pilgrimage to the motherland. I spent 4 days in NYC catching up with a lot of friends and colleagues and editors and editors and colleagues who are also friends, and now I'm in Colorado visiting family. This place is so verdant and beautiful and secluded that places like Lebanon seem very far away indeed. But on the Egypt Air flight I took out of Cairo, the war in Lebanon was brought thundering home. As I took my seat I noticed that many of the people around me were speaking a dialect of Arabic that was not Egyptian. When I heard a woman's voice say 'Beirut' followed by a sigh, and I realized with a shock that the plane was full of Lebanese evacuees. In the row parallel to mine, a tastefully dressed woman was sitting with a girl who looked like her daughter, who was perhaps nineteen or twenty. They wore expressions that don't have names--relief mingled with exhaustion and happiness that is not really happiness, but the triumphant and painful proximity of the future after a narrow scrape with death. That's one I have experience with; I wore it often after a long and exhausting illness I had in college, and I recognized it.

The woman, after sitting quietly for a few minutes, leaned her head against the seat-back in front of her and began to cry. Her daughter looked alarmed, and began to pet her shoulder. 'Okay, Mama,' she said, 'Okay.' The woman wiped her eyes and pulled herself together. I looked away, not wanting to intrude on their grief, and feeling deeply disturbed. I started to read the novel I had brought on board with me. When I looked up again the mother and daughter were gone, along with the somber middle-aged man--who carried no baggage--who had been sitting on the aisle next to me. The seat the man had occupied was empty, but the mother and daughter had been replaced by a large, florid Egyptian man who was smiling. At first I didn't understand what had happened. But listening to the chatter passing back and forth along the aisles, I learned that the passengers in First Class--mostly Egyptians, but also a smattering of American and European expats--had given up their seats for the evacuees.

I have cried in public on exactly three occasions: at seventeen, during a break-up with my first boyfriend; on 9/11; and on Egypt Air Flight 985. On this last occasion I managed to keep myself together pretty well; I felt that of all the people on the flight, I had the absolute least reason to be upset. I was returning home, not leaving it behind, perhaps forever. But I was so moved by this small gesture of sympathy on the part of the First Class passengers that I felt overwhelmed. Alan Moore calls it "the very last inch of us", this frank and unassuming grace that we achieve in times of great need. It is a kind of human divinity that only emerges in the midst of human horror, and it breaks me, it is so beautiful.