“And the man who jumped from al-Azhar Bridge?” I asked. “Was he a believer or an atheist?”
The Saint laughed. “Well, of course I’ve no idea. Maybe he saw something you’ve never seen. Knows something you don’t. You can’t pass judgment on someone who pisses on passersby, then jumps bare-naked and breaks his neck.”
Where had the days of the classic suicide gone? The note to the lover, the bottle of poison, the rope from the ceiling, the sleeping pills, the wrists slit lengthways, and, of course, the severe depression leading up to the final act?
We were through the tombs and Manshiyat Nasr appeared before us. The Saint was tired of walking, it seemed, and he flagged down a tuktuk to take us to the other side of the neighborhood. As he clambered in, he said, “We’ll drive through Manshiyat Nasr to the foot of Muqattam. We’re pretty close now, it won’t take more than ten minutes.”
Farida was still on my mind and I’d see her today, for sure. I’d wasted my first day in East Cairo but today I had nothing to do. I’d go back to Sharif Street and look for her. Burhan, who I’d forgotten all about, suddenly flew off my shoulder and landed on the Saint’s head. The Saint laughed and made no comment, and the tuktuk driver glanced at us in the mirror and smiled. Then Burhan returned to his perch on my shoulder. For some reason, the Saint’s words echoed in my head and I thought to myself that both the suicide and the Saint—and maybe Burhan, too—knew what I did not.
The tuktuk stopped when the last buildings appeared ahead of us. Cairo’s outermost point: Manshiyat Nasr, the tombs, Salah Salim, and the rest of the city behind us, and before us the vast cliff face of Muqattam. We walked for a while over uneven ground, the base of the cliff ahead of us and not far away—though very far from any buildings, roads, or humans, and surrounded by a broad expanse of wasteland and an electric fence—the Knights of Malta’s rocket launchers sat ranged across a hillock. It was from this point that they had bombarded West Cairo. I looked behind me and saw the ghost of the Cairo Tower far, far away, enveloped in a miasma of dust and smoke, and I had no idea if it was empty or if someone was stationed there.
The Saint started scaling the hillock’s sloped side, now and then resorting to his hands to help him climb. In a state of great excitement, I followed him until we came to a narrow, level platform about a meter high that looked like a table, missing only chairs and a feast. I noticed a trace of water on the stone surface, as though the clouds had rained over just this tiny patch and it had not yet dried. We went down steps carved out of the stone behind the platform, and I saw a hollow, like a narrow little valley, into which the Saint walked with me following after, and then, as if by magic, there was a brand new door set into a sandy, yellow rock wall. The Saint knocked, the door was opened, and we went in.
A cramped tunnel led to a cramped chamber in which a man stood carrying a Kalashnikov with its safety catch engaged. He seemed perfectly calm, but when he caught sight of me he flicked the safety catch off, and his eyes and trigger finger tensed. The Saint raised his palm in the man’s face and said, “Relax, he’s with me,” but he didn’t relax, just gripped his gun. We stood there until another man came and searched us for weapons. He searched us with the scrupulousness and courtesy of a veteran cop. I know what a policeman’s hand feels like when he searches you without wanting to humiliate you, and if it hadn’t been for the man clinging to the Kalashnikov I would have asked him his rank.
We passed through another door and down a long passage, which branched into many more passages and tunnels. We were underground, the walls and ceiling of solid Muqattam rock, rough to the touch—the roughness of age and immutability. I was now properly lost in the network of impossibly narrow shafts. I couldn’t remember which way we’d come, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to make it back alone. No weapon, and I didn’t know anyone here except the Saint; my survival depended on his.
“Ready?” the Saint asked. “We’ll be going into the first room where they collect the raw material.”
Then he opened a door and a powerful, organic stench rolled out.
Numerous barrels were set on the ground and a man stood among them wearing rubber boots reaching to the knee and jeans, while his unclothed upper body revealed his extreme skinniness. He turned to us, then went back to inspecting the sieve in his hand, passing his fingers through a large hole in the mesh and trying to gauge its width.
Curious, I went over to the closest barrel, looked in, and found that it was full of little scarabs—hundreds and hundreds of black beetles covered by a thin layer of soil, some of them attempting to flee by scaling the inner walls of their barrel but slipping back down the smooth surface. I froze, trying to understand what was going on.
The Saint lit a cigarette and told the man he’d put it out in just a second, then went over to another barrel. “This,” I heard him say, “is how Egyptians started consuming karbon. . . .” He stuck the hand holding the cigarette into the barrel, moved his arm around as though searching for something, then pulled it out. A fat red ant was stuck on the tip of the lit cigarette, beating the air with its spindly legs as it tried to flee. The Saint lifted the cigarette to his mouth, eyes fixed on the ant in case it fell, then took a very long drag; the coal glowed and the ant convulsed. I saw it drumming its front legs against its head. The Saint took another drag, and halfway through the ant stopped moving. A pungent smell filled the room, the smell of a red ant burnt to death. Then the Saint took a third drag, and the corpse curled up completely and became a black dot, bearing no resemblance to the creature it had been. He let the cigarette fall and stamped to extinguish it. “That’s the lowest grade karbon,” he said. “The ants. What you smoked yesterday was the best—the sacred scarab of our forefathers.”
8
I WAS PREPARING THE JOINT al fresco, the bright sunlight bathed my skin, and I felt unusually happy and at ease. It was a beautiful morning and it made me forget how dull the days were, suspended up here in the sky.
At the top of the tower, a man could think terrible thoughts: jumping into the Nile, not in order to kill yourself but from a yearning to embrace the water. I’d fantasize that, after falling from that great height into the Nile’s broad span, I would be saved, would survive, would plunge down a few meters, then bob back up, relishing the cold water, and maybe swimming over to the five battleships and banging on their hulls with my fist, a challenge to the Knights of Malta’s sovereignty, then back to the banks of the island to find my companions waiting. I’d think about firing indiscriminately on pedestrians along the Corniche. Those people didn’t care about the battleships; perhaps they were in favor of the occupier staying. Thousands of cars passed down that road each day, thousands of pedestrians, gazing over at West Cairo, free from the control of the Knights of Malta, and knowing that over there someone was holding out, someone who might be sacrificing his life to expel the occupier, and yet they did not join him. Cairo was a truly corrupt city. Whenever news reached me of rebellions in the Delta, I wondered at the tame creatures who lived around me and did not resist. I thought of opening fire on the windows of the television building that rang with praise of the Knights of Malta all day long. The official home of government broadcasting deserved to be bombed without any warning being given to those inside.
I thought how afraid the Knights of Malta’s soldiers would be if we took to killing them, then grilling them over coals and eating their flesh. Maybe then they’d leave, not out of fear of dying, but for fear of ending up as shit in Cairo’s sewers. And I thought that all that had happened and was happening was ordained, and yet we went on resisting regardless.
As I fixed the joint, I was staring at a drone drawing away toward West Cairo. A short while before, we’d received a smaller than usual block of hash and orders stressing the need for restraint for a twenty-four-hour period, during which time we were completely forbidden from firing on East Cairo. We immediately realized that a group from the leadership must be moving in the east that day, and might be passing down the
Corniche or slipping into the television building, and they were concerned we’d hit them or worried about security measures being tightened up, standard procedure after one of our attacks. The order for restraint was very encouraging, suggesting we were building up to some exceptional action. Would the mounting pressure really force the Knights of Malta to leave? I pictured them bewildered: wanting to leave, but having nowhere else to go. Perhaps we’d throw them out and they’d occupy another country, oppress another people. I didn’t much care. I was bored of being up here. Every day, I’d weigh the benefits of what I was doing and then I’d go back to thinking that there was no other way.
With the first drag, I realized that the hash was spiked, mixed with a large quantity of other chemicals. This was unusual, but I carried on smoking, keen to try a different high. Whatever had been added, pills or otherwise, the effect on me was dramatic.
Following the fourth drag, the chemicals had overwhelmed the hash. I lay stretched out on the ground on the top floor, the heavens above my head aglow, marveling at the insistent light and the purity of the sky, while the metal spikes tilting outward from the top of the balcony’s railing looked to me like a monster’s claw with a thousand talons, and I pictured those talons closing on me and my companions, closing in and crushing us all, without hope of escape. Looking over at those who were with me, I saw them similarly stretched out on the ground or with their backs against the balcony’s wall, all of them silent, and then I was visited by very short bursts of total awareness of everything around me, moments when my senses were fully alert: I could clearly smell the reek of hash smoke filling my nostrils, the scent of the soap I’d washed my face with two hours before, and the anti-inflammatory cream one of us had rubbed on his shoulder. The most distant sounds were perfectly audible: window shutters being closed in a building overlooking the Corniche in West Cairo; starlings gathered in the branches of a huge tree by the zoo and chirruping with wild hysteria. And somewhere in Imbaba, a brawl—twenty men slapping with their hands, and then the real fight, when voices fell still, insults were choked off, and it was out with the blades, tots and teens hurling bricks and stones at the combatants, and then the sound of shotgun blasts from zip guns and the reports of Egyptian-made automatics, and an ironmonger roaring in rage in a street nearby as he fished out guns he’d finished making just yesterday, putting them in a hold-all to be distributed to one side in the battle. And car horns blaring as they circled Tahrir Square in East Cairo, trying to escape that circle of hell, endless minutes of the drivers’ and passengers’ lives lost with no hope of recovery or of putting them to use. I saw the cars creeping forward before they were hidden behind the massive edifices of Talaat Harb Street, which blocked them from view but not from my gaze. I saw all things in outline, the sizes and dimensions of cars and pedestrians described without color, or shade, or surface: outlines that meant I couldn’t tell their make and number, or the bulk and height of those that rode inside. I saw the shapes of bodies walking behind buildings, and I could hear them as clearly as if I were moving among them—an irreducible tangle of human sounds and voices. Slowly, though, these moments of heightened consciousness faded into the long periods of disengagement that followed. Were these really bursts of consciousness, or was I completely out of it, just dreaming that I heard, and saw, and smelled it all? And I thought to myself that they had sent us this spiked hash to make sure we were properly intoxicated: living corpses, incapable of action.
With difficulty, I got to my feet, staggered over to the railing, and tried waking one of those slumped on the floor, but he didn’t move or answer me. I called his name, but got it wrong. “Ali?” I tried to remember who he was, but couldn’t, and started kicking him gently in the leg. Slowly, he turned to look at me, made no response, and just then my head cleared, and I knew we were in grave trouble; our first lines of defense were high as kites and unable to do a thing. Hash calmed us down and helped us to relax, but this stuff had robbed us of our faculties. I walked around the balcony to the other side and looked out over West Cairo. Everything was as it should be, or so it seemed.
Suddenly, I heard a sharp hiss, like a firework taking off or the air being let out of a tire. I couldn’t tell where the sound had come from. I peered around and a thought occurred to me: maybe we were in hell. Maybe that had been the Devil farting—a tongue of flame and a sound to make you jump. I stared out, ready for a pillar of fire to appear or a line of flame to cross the heavens, but all I saw was a small, dark object plummeting out of the sky at a tremendous speed. Baffling. Then light flooded the spot where it had landed and there was the powerful, unmistakable sound of an explosion, and intersecting balls of fire blossomed out and became black smoke. West Cairo was being bombarded for the first time since the beginning of the occupation.
I raced around to the other side of the balcony, to East Cairo. As I ran, I tilted my body toward the main body of the tower, and the balcony’s fence flashed by me, its railings flickering past my eyes. It seemed to take forever to get there, and I lifted my wrist in order to look at my watch, and remembered I hadn’t worn one for many years, and then I came to a halt. I must have run two circuits around the tower, I thought, and I hadn’t yet reached my colleagues lying slumped and stoned. I must go back in the opposite direction if I wanted to get to the east-facing side. The tower’s balcony was a circular maze with no way out. Then I looked out to the horizon, and I saw that all was peaceful and that nothing was out of the ordinary—the Nile flowing sedately north, indifferent to any shit that might be taking place on its banks—when I heard one of my colleagues scream my name.
Momentarily sobered, I sprinted over, closing the distance in a couple of seconds. The snipers were standing by the railing, looking out over East Cairo. They were staring at the battleships anchored in the Nile directly below us. I stood next to them and heard one say, “There, at the edge of the city,” and he pointed east.
The rocket’s exhaust trail could be clearly seen. It began at the base of the Muqattam hill, rose up until it had passed over our heads, then gradually disappeared. Even as he pointed, another rocket launched, tracing a second white line across the sky parallel to the first, and then a third, and a fourth. My supernatural awareness was fading once again, it seemed, as if the hash high and the chemicals’ unexpected impact were ebbing away as I tracked the rocket rising up over our heads and vanishing into the sky, and I could see nothing but a glimmer, like a tiny star exploding by day. Then it dropped quickly toward West Cairo and the rocket’s body opened to release hundreds of little objects, small bombs that would complete the descent, widening the area of impact and the damage done. They hit a number of buildings and flattened them, even as the bodies of the third and fourth rockets broke open, spilling the cluster bombs that would make sure this patch of West Cairo was utterly destroyed.
And I heard the sound of things being demolished, and of particles of soft dust, of the moans of the dead, and of souls ripped from their bodies—though which was ripping which, I couldn’t tell—of women weeping, their hands slapping their cheeks as the fire consumed their children, of cars speeding by, then stopping, the drivers sprinting heedlessly toward shattered homes, shunting the rubble aside in terror, and thousands beneath the wreckage pleading for water or for death, of doctors bellowing, asking for things I couldn’t understand, of boys on motorbikes lifting up bleeding bodies and gunning away, stony-faced, in search of a hospital, of workmen from the south calling out the names of their friends as they heaved the debris away with their bare hands, of a man lighting a cigarette, then smoking it with equanimity and enjoyment, his body lying beneath tons of concrete, and brick, and wood, no hope for him at all, saying, “Why not enjoy yourself before you die?” of a woman crying, “At last!” as she surrendered to a freefall as rapid as the bedroom door, ceiling, and floor that plummeted down around her, of someone calling out from the mosque’s minaret, and no one understanding him and so leaving him to rave, of dogs howling and not understanding, barking
and not understanding, running and not understanding. And I did not understand.
When night fell, the rockets were still being launched from the edge of East Cairo, and white smoke trails were replaced by the jets of flame spat out by the rockets as they disappeared into the darkness. Half West Cairo in ruins. The drug was still working, and it looked as though it wouldn’t stop any time soon. None of the members of the resistance on the ground made a move and no citizen of East Cairo stirred to attack the rocket launchers or stop them, and I later learned that that day had been the calmest in East Cairo since the occupation began. Not a single Maltese trooper was harmed, and the public acted as though what was happening was perfectly normal. One of my colleagues, slumped next to me in an attitude of surrender, said, “Even if we’d been fully awake, we wouldn’t have done a thing.”
I watched East Cairo through my scope, looking for just one soldier, a single officer, to bring down. The rifle was steady in my hands, but I was not, and I saw thousands standing by the Corniche, watching the bombardment of West Cairo with an extraordinary lack of emotion, as though it were some imaginary city being bombarded in sound and light on a movie screen. The vendors moved through the crowd in perfect safety, and many of them sat down in the middle of the road as if taking a break from some grueling exertion. No one crossed any of the bridges to help the inhabitants of the west.
By the following morning, the black smoke from the fires had traveled a considerable distance south: a vast cloud of darkness stationary over what was left of West Cairo and an unbroken tail trailing away from the city. Life went on in East Cairo as though the day before had been just like any other. Cars sped down the Corniche, their passengers glancing casually at the ruins of their neighbor, and by noon, crowds had gathered where they’d stood the day before—leaving work and coming to stand and see what had happened, hoping that the city would be bombarded again today.
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