Letter from Egypt: in Port Said, public grief is as hard to take in as the murders

The room was little bigger than a king-sized bed, and yet there must have been nearly 30 people sitting inside it. It wasn't a place for a stranger. Not just because it involved clambering over those inside, and treading on their shoes – but because they were dressed in black, it was midnight, and this was a night-long wake for their murdered son, Osama Sherbini.

The family were sitting in their first-floor tenement flat in Port Said, northern Egypt. Over the previous five days more than 40 people had died here in gunfights between police and locals. Sherbini, 22, was one of them.

Reports differ as to why the massacre started, but the gist is this: on 26 January, a Saturday, a court sentenced to death 21 sons of Port Said for their alleged part in a football riot last year that killed more than 70 rival fans from Cairo. Locals contested the decision, believing that the condemned had been framed by the hated police – the institution that came to symbolise the Mubarak dictatorship that was toppled two years ago today, which has yet to be reformed and whose continued brutality is partly responsible for the latest round of Egyptian civil unrest.

Enraged by the court decision, either relatives or gangsters (or both) attacked a jail where the prisoners were being held – and the shooting started soon after. It continued on the Sunday, at a funeral for those who died on the Saturday, and it seeped into Monday, as locals and human rights researchers reported that police began firing indiscriminately at passersby. One of them was Osama Sherbini – defying a military curfew, his family said, to buy food for his sick father.

It was reporting on this curfew that had brought me to Port Said. There had been stories of post-curfew football matches in the city's central square, and so the idea was to write an upbeat piece about a community's festive resilience in the face of state repression. Yet that night there was no football, and little festivity.

Instead, at a crossroads where shopkeepers said around 20 had been killed in the crossfire, there were pools of dried blood, and story after story about the death of someone's son, father, husband or friend. It was a shocking night. But after a while, it was difficult to pinpoint what was harder to digest: the deaths that were being mourned – or the openness of the mourners, and the very public nature of their grief.

In England, grief is – stereotypically, at least – a reserved activity. Private. Internalised. Behind closed doors. Yet in Port Said it seemed the opposite: externalised, in some cases almost performative, yet no less sincere. At a march in protest at the killings the next morning, the mother of one of the victims was driven through the crowds of marchers in a taxi, holding up a photograph of her son. As she passed, she thrust from the car window the bloodstained jacket he died in, a bullet-hole ripped through the shoulder.

In the port's fish market across town, above the trays of shrimps and crabs, there hung the vast face of Walid, a local fishmonger shot on the Saturday. What was striking was not just the very public, very visible nature of the memorial, but the speed at which it must have been – in the space of a few hectic days – printed, laminated and erected by Walid's grieving colleagues. They wanted their customers to know about Walid, and they wanted them to know now.

Back on the march, there was a tap on my shoulder. The bereaved family of another victim, Mohamed Asseyad al-Arafi, was waiting patiently to be interviewed. Later, they would return to say more – as if talking had in some way become part of the family's means of dealing with their grief.

It was this hopeful assumption that saw me picking my way through a crowded wake to talk to the mother of Osama Sherbini. I had arrived there by accident, splashing aimlessly through Port Said's puddles, chatting to another local. When we reached Sherbini's block, his brother, sitting outside, discovered I was a journalist and invited us in. At first the thought seemed twisted: crashing a wake for the sake of a quote seemed an intrusion too far. Yet Aymini had a smile on his face, and at that moment it felt as if this was something he wanted to happen.

So up we went, and two minutes later found ourselves face to face with his mother, Ansafi Moussa; 30 more silent mourners staring at us. Like Aymini, she was unexpectedly warm, as if having visitors for tea. She was frank, too – almost matter-of-fact. Osama's school certificates were to hand, and she flicked through them, explaining what a good student he was, how pious, and how devoted a son.Clearly, the openness of her grief was no less sincere than the private kind one might have expected. But it was different and surprising – and it made you wonder at its cause.

Was it a means of regaining agency at a time when the city was so helpless and marginalised? Part of Moussa's controlled anger, and the anger in Port Said more generally, stemmed from a feeling of abandonment by metropolitan Cairo. The curfew was confined to the provinces; the death sentences were felt to be appeasing the families of the Cairo fans killed in last year's football riot. So the upfront – and at times seemingly nonchalant – nature of some of the city's mourners was perhaps a means of confronting the isolation that had partly caused their grief in the first place.

Elsewhere, it was easy to see why a facade of nonchalance was so necessary. Half an hour later, I was back at the bloodstained crossroads, interviewing another pair of locals. Suddenly, two warning shots from the still-lurking police sniper cracked through the air above our heads. Manu, my translator, and I instinctively bolted up the road. When we stopped sprinting, our relief at having escaped was matched only by our amazement at our interviewees: completely unruffled, they were strolling slowly up the road, still in full view of the restless sniper.

In a week that had already seen so much death, and on a spot where there was still so much danger, studied indifference was perhaps the only way to cope.