Insal wandered aimlessly down streets and over intersections, and people started stopping him and asking him where he was going, demanding to see his identity card, and then apologizing, excusing their behavior: the city going up in flames, thieves everywhere. And Insal? He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand at all.
Again and again, Insal halted in front of groups of young men so they could check his ID: group after group, at every road junction, street corner, and café, until he was tired of stopping. He wanted to walk with nowhere in mind, to leave all his cares on the sidewalk, to unburden himself step by step, and these men insisted on stopping him and reminding him of everything that weighed him down.
A decrepit old man walked by, dressed in the tattered garb of the madmen who roamed the city streets, a huge pack of dogs trotting after him—street dogs, some small and slight, others big and bulky with floppy ears, all missing tails, and paws, and eyes, and clumps of fur. They scurried along in the dog man’s wake, staying close. He was looking for something, looking into people’s faces, staring for a few seconds before moving off and continuing his search.
Insal went on, keeping clear of the other pedestrians. He passed a grocer’s and the colors and shapes of the fruit on display refreshed his weary soul. He purchased an orange with the idea of squeezing it for juice: he loved the acid tang on his tongue. He bought an apple, thinking to cut it into little chunks for Zahra: she could eat them from her little hand. He bought a banana, to peel for Leila: were bananas good for pregnant women?
The dog man approached him. For a few seconds, they stood facing one another on the sidewalk. The dog man was in his way, and whenever Insal tried to get past, the other moved to block him. The dogs surrounded them, circled them, yawned. “These are false pleasures,” the man said. “You have taken your first steps now, and it shall be but a few short days until you see all. I tell you: take pleasure in what is false, for you shall not see it again.”
Then the dog man went on his way.
They caught the thief in the street. That’s what they thought him: a thief. Because he hadn’t any ID. He was beaten and tortured, and when he grabbed hold of the knife that one of them was trying to stab him with, they all took to their heels in terror, the man remaining behind, grasping the knife and unable to believe what had happened. He ran off, tossing the blade as he went, and Insal stepped in. He grabbed the man and held him fast for a moment. The people caught up with the thief. That’s what they thought he was: a thief.
By the time they put the noose over his head, he’d been dead for several minutes. He felt nothing when they strung him from the lamp post. They would leave him like that for hours until someone came at night to cut the rope and the body fell to the ground.
Insal stood beside the hanging body. Its hand was close to his face, the thing he could see most clearly: slack, half-gripping air, a deep cut on the back. The only cut. The nails were clean and the fingers well formed. Unable to resist, he looked up at the face. Here he was, looking at a hanged man for the first time.
He went home, exhausted. Just an hour he’d been walking, but it had left him a wreck. How could he go to the morgue today after all that? How could he pick Zahra up and carry her inside through the square metal doors?
Leila and Zahra were asleep. He closed the bedroom door on them and went out into the living room. There, he beat at his temples. He tugged at his hair. He covered his mouth with his hand and started to scream. He jumped up and down. He bit his fingers. He gripped his shirt and tugged at it violently, trying to rip it. Then he started slapping his face with a relentless rhythm, a slap every two seconds, one slap after another, striking harder with each one. His head rang from the powerful impacts, his view of the living room jolted violently, and by the end each blow seemed to flood the scene before him with a bright light, which would soon fade as the sight of the darkened room returned to his eyes. These flashes of light calmed Insal. They were moments when he was totally cut off from the world, far from the streets, and the hanging body, and Zahra, and Leila. After a quarter of an hour of violence, he settled. His breathing grew regular and his distress dwindled. He went back to wake up Leila and Zahra.
Insal was worn out when he reached Qasr al-Aini hospital. Amid the chaos, he asked where he might find the wounded, the missing, and the dead, and staff directed him to the registry, where the names of the injured were recorded. A man asked him for a name, searched for it in the register, and—when he couldn’t find it—told him to go to the morgue, where bodies were waiting to be identified.
Considerably unnerved, Insal stood outside the doors and, before going in, remembered that he didn’t know what the man looked like. He’d never seen him before, not even a picture of him. He felt a flash of regret for being so hasty and for not calling the principal, but he put it to one side. He was outside the door to the morgue now and he had no choice but to go on. All he knew was the man’s three-part name, as listed in the school’s records. The morgue attendant stood outside the massive door, waiting for visitors. His face impassive, his words clipped, he asked for the missing person’s details: all three names, what relation he was to Insal, the place he went missing, and when he was last in touch. Insal gave him the name plus the usual lie, that the man was a cousin on his mother’s side. After a short search, the attendant said that the name wasn’t on the list, but Insal might like to go in and look over the bodies since, in addition to those whose names were known, there were many anonymous bodies. Maybe the missing man was one of them.
Insal agreed, without the first idea who he was searching for. He went in and started moving between the bodies bundled together on steel trolleys and staring at the faces of those stretched out on the floor. They were much disfigured, with wounds to chests, and limbs, and faces. Some were naked. It looked like these ones had been identified. They were to have their chests sliced open to determine the cause of death. Their nakedness suggested surrender. The others—clothed, bloody, torn, and in a few instances even burned—had yet to give in. They were still waiting for friends and relatives to strip them and cut open their chests, waiting for the doctor to hunt for the cause of death, to extract the bullets and shrapnel. The expressions on the faces varied (fear, panic, surprise) but all had one thing in common, clear to the naked eye: indifference—the last thing the dead had felt as their souls departed their bodies.
All were men, he noticed, and he felt certain that there must be women laid out somewhere else, naked, too, no one allowed to see them but fellow females. Decent in death as in life.
He found the bodies of twins, astonishingly alike, their injuries the only thing that separated them. Both had died from gunshot wounds to the chest. They had been placed on a pair of tables side by side, the same expression on their faces, their arms at rest in the same pose, and their hands identically positioned: forefingers crossed beneath middle fingers. Their lower lips sagged down to reveal teeth blackened by cigarette smoke, and there were hairless lines through both their left eyebrows. The lines looked deliberately made, by a barber or by the twins themselves, to further emphasize the sacred resemblance. But doppelgängers in life did not necessarily mean doppelgängers in death. The bullet holes were disposed differently over the two chests: one had three clean holes clustered by the collarbone on the right-hand side, while on the second two could be seen, one in the middle of the chest, the other by the belly, and then a third that seemed to appear, then vanish. Insal was confused. Was that really a bullet hole, or some trick of the mind? He was dead, that was enough. Both were dead and neither were Zahra’s father. But near perfect interchangeability forced Insal to the conclusion that this was a single body killed twice.
He couldn’t shake the thought. Could these two bodies be vessels for a single soul that had hopped from one to the other when the first man had died?
Before today, Insal had never seen slain bodies, just the dead: the bodies of people he knew who had slipped quietly away after sickness or in their sleep, beneath
oxygen masks in hospital beds or in intensive care units. He’d seen one or two lying on the road under sheets of newspaper. He’d seen a body that had been run over by a car before passersby could cover it with their papers—had seen it from a distance, so hadn’t made out the details of the dead man’s face. Today, though, he’d gazed into many faces, trying to find a man he didn’t know.
These were wounds in his soul that would remain unhealed until the day he died.
He went on moving from face to face, and in the end could see no logical reason for what he was doing, yet still he went on from face to face without the power to stop, and when he’d finished his first circuit of the faces around he went again, slowly inspecting each one, their features imprinting themselves on his memory the instant he saw them. He found this reassuring: perhaps he’d see the man’s picture somewhere, at a relative’s or even in one of the school files, and he could search his memory for the likeness. He was transferring the flesh bundled on the tables and floor into his memory, afraid lest their features be lost, afraid lest they be lost to the dirt.
The morgue attendant asked him if he knew who he was looking for. Did he know his face? Insal’s repeated circling, combined with the clichéd fabrication he’d given him earlier, had aroused his suspicions. Insal was briefly at a loss, then he answered in the negative. The attendant didn’t object or turn him away. None of those who came looking knew those they were searching for, it seemed. The attendant asked him to bring along a relative of the missing man—maybe they would know. That’s what the law required, he said. What Insal was doing right now was against the law. Then his tone changed and his expression softened a little. He said that the dead were better off than the living these days, that many people would come here and identify their dead, and would then be killed themselves and thereby be spared the suffering of their loss.
But Insal was thinking of Zahra and her father. He wanted to find the man, even if he was dead. He told the attendant that the missing man had a four-year-old daughter and that she was the only person who could identify him. She was the only member of the family that he knew. Calmly, the attendant said that he must bring the child to identify her father, if he was here.
Insal froze. He said nothing in response, and assumed the man was mocking him, but the seriousness of his expression gave the lie to his suspicion. What was happening was wonderful, the attendant said. It was the only solution, no matter how strange that might seem.
He said that he knew precisely why Insal felt sorry for the girl: because he thought that the faces of the dead would stop her sleeping. Insal mustn’t worry, he said, a child’s memory was exceptionally unstable—she’d only retain the image of her slain father’s face for a few weeks and then she would forget it utterly. And as for the other bodies, she’d remember them for a few days afterward, then they, too, would vanish from her mind, their place taken by other memories, other images, more terrible still—or kinder. Intensely grave, he said, “Who knows? Maybe there’s some kind of mercy in seeing the faces of the dead.”
Insal left the morgue, not understanding what was happening all around him. In his head, he sketched out grim visions of his scheduled visit with Zahra. He pictured her entering the hospital all alone while he waited behind at the door, and he pictured her tiny form, so small, disappearing into the massive entrance, then climbing the stairs to the right. . . . Picturing what came after that became difficult.
The attendant envied all those outside—those who fired the bullets and those who received them—and wished that he might deal with the bodies only. Their relatives were more than he could handle. Chaos reigned in every corner of the morgue, and the attendant knew that many had buried their dead, that at that very moment many more were burying unidentified bodies, and that only a very few were here, moving between the corpses. They were the ones in true torment. He knew that the young woman over there would take months to find her brother, even though her brother lay dead in a hospital nearby. He knew that this other girl would find her brother alive the very next day, and that months later he would be killed and she would not have to search for him, for he would have died before her eyes. He knew that this father would find the body of his son tomorrow, and that after a few months of ceaseless grief he would follow him to the grave. He knew that no one would locate these three bodies, that no one would even search them out, and that they would be buried without friends or family in attendance, as strangers. And the attendant surveyed the faultless arrangement. Inspected, for the thousandth time, the plan’s perfection. These strangers, tormented by the sight of other strangers.
The people out in the streets were angry. Murder was abroad. Unknown assailants dealt death from above and below. They believed they were throwing off injustice, and they believed that the tyrant was fighting them. Indeed, the tyrant believed he was winning. And the people thought likewise—that they were winning. But there would be no victory today. There’d be no victory here, ever.
Insal had no understanding of what was happening around him. Like the others, he thought injustice was being driven away. Although he had never sought to be any part of events, had never had any desire to join a demonstration, he left the hospital that day and joined one without meaning to.
Walking along in the midst of the chanting crowds, he saw them dropping to the ground for no clear reason. A man stood there, frozen in place for an instant, then collapsed. Down went that man—and then the arms of another man, who’d been waving and chanting, dropped to his sides, and he fell on his face, thumping into the ground. A red rose suddenly bloomed on a temple and the face vanished.
Insal took fright and started to run, not knowing what he ran from, but he saw people pointing to the skies, and screaming, and sprinting away from whatever they were pointing at, and he followed the line of their forefingers and saw a perfectly ordinary building, and when he heard the people shouting, “Sniper!” his gaze automatically went to the roof, looking out for a figure. Then he saw a little flash and someone next to him, who had just that instant been screaming out, fell to the ground. Insal sprinted away.
He took shelter by the corner of a second, larger building, just as a sniper’s round tore into the other side of the wall. Insal saw neither the round nor the effect of its impact. On his side of the wall, the corner was undamaged. The bullet hadn’t penetrated it. The concrete must have absorbed the impact. The other side of the corner had been totally disfigured: a hole surrounded by devastation, a bullet wound in the building.
He rested on the ground with others. He’d never heard such a noise in his life. A cacophony of screams, gunfire, and the reports from muffled explosions came to him from all sides. He had crossed this square many times in his life and had never seen crowds to match the chaotic mob now before him. He saw many people rush over to the fallen. To rescue them. Insal stretched his legs out in surrender. The reek of the fallen demonstrators’ blood was pungent and fresh, and he recalled the way the blood had tasted when he’d knock a tooth out as a child.
The rescuers spotted a man lying on the ground, a quarter of his head gone—his right eye, half his forehead, and his temple—and they peered at what was left and saw that it was empty, without a brain, just a dark hollow devoid of flesh and sinew, and then all of them instinctively clapped their hands to their heads to make sure, to check that their heads were still whole and that their brains were still in place.
A man cried out plaintively, “Fucked! The world is fucked!” A second man asked him what was going on (“Who’s killing who?”) to which the first snapped, “Well, whoever’s killing us, they aren’t human. Who knows what they are?”
Then many people swarmed around Insal, wanting to lift him up and carry him to an ambulance, but he told them he was fine; he soothed them and he soothed himself. He only wanted to get moving and get home, he said, and after a few minutes he took advantage of their numbers and melted into them, heading toward the metro, fleeing from the heavens.
As he made his way to
the metro, he thought to himself that Zahra would suffer greatly when he brought her to the morgue the next day.
In the streets, the people were weeping from rage. They had seen the blood plain before their eyes.
And they were threatening their enemy with vengeance, raising angry fists, chanting threats of execution. They were not in confusion: they believed that they spoke the truth, that they were on the right path, and that they, for all that, were a minority; that while they stood firm in the face of the tyrant and his horde, the majority stood with the tyrant. Yet they believed, too, that their victory was ordained and near at hand. And not one of them knew that all this was fantasy. They did not know that hope was an illusion.
They would shoulder the burden of a vengeance that would never be satisfied, and they would be tormented as no one had been tormented before.
3
IN A WIDE STREET NEAR Insal’s home, heaps of refuse rose up in piles to form a clutch of pyramids, the product of the trash collectors’ months-long strike. At first, a little mound took shape in the middle of the road, and then everyone who threw out their garbage would launch it to the top of the mound, and the mound grew taller until it had become a great hill as high as the Giza pyramids.
Then a second pyramid appeared, and a third, and a fourth, and then there were seven pyramids stacked down the road’s center, and it was dubbed Pyramids Street. And for some reason, people forgot that it had been they who had built them.
A man was walking there, trailed by two girls, one eleven, the other a child of four. The man had come from nearby, from beneath the overpass on the main road where he slept each night, while the girls had come as fugitives from an insane father. They remembered little, had no need for memory in the first place, for what was to come would be sufficient to leave the most terrible impression on the older girl. She knew that what was to come was terrible and knew, too, that there was no escaping it, and she surrendered to this knowledge absolutely. This sense of inevitability was her only comfort.
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