Through the window came the accustomed clamor of the street. I was lying on the bed, following the speech on my television’s little screen, and struggling to read the spidery lines as I attempted to work out what was going on. Quarter of an hour in, the noise outside gradually started to swell, and transformed into a joyful and spontaneous celebration, a happy chaos with shouts and patriotic anthems ringing out. This people, the cries affirmed, does not know the meaning of impossible: Egypt’s golden sun has risen once more, stronger than ever before, and all creation has ground to a halt—stopped breathing, stopped working, stopped everything—to witness how the foundations of glory may be laid without any outside help at all. Then they all surrendered to cliché, crying that they loved their country, that it was more than love—the homeland claimed their very hearts.
And though no one knew who this General al-Gamali was, all rejoiced because an Egyptian would be ruling Egypt once again; and when we saw him, short and squat, head tilted back to salute the towering field marshal, we smiled the smile of those who catch sight of their beloved child—weak and flawed, but beloved—and we told ourselves that in his shortness lay his guile and cunning. The man was the least among us, and it seemed that we were simply waiting for someone to lead our country—anyone—and I thought to myself that a short-assed patriot in hell was preferable to a foreign occupier in the selfsame hell.
And the people disregarded the absurdity of the whole thing—of the field marshal’s ridiculous speech, of his unprecedented promotion of General al-Gamali—and instead rejoiced greatly at the return of the Egyptian Army to the fray, all convinced that the army had taken part in the resistance operations. I was reading comments online and thinking back to the things I’d done during my years with the resistance (and what I’d experienced of the army’s total absence and the absolute control of the police), and whenever I caught myself wondering where my letter had got to—my message from the resistance leadership congratulating me on our victory and welcoming me back to the Interior Ministry—I’d immediately remember that nothing mattered any more. We were swallowed up into hell, and we did not know it.
Following the speech, events moved fast, for the Knights of Malta departed the country as quickly as they had occupied it. They moved their weaponry and gear from Cairo and the Delta down the Nile and its branches, through the narrow roads that linked the heartland with the north, and out into the Mediterranean Sea. They cleared out of their bases, and out of our bases that they’d occupied, and offloaded damaged equipment and most of their light arms, handing them over to seed the rearmament of the Egyptian army. They met no resistance to speak of—unflagging assistance, rather—and the whole thing was wrapped up inside a week.
For that week, people walked the streets full of hope. Smiles returned to faces. And I walked among them, awestruck by the sheer scale of what was afoot. All of them would soon be back in torment, I knew. I didn’t know how it would happen, but I knew that it would, and I spent most of my time at home, only rarely going outside. I was no longer able to bear the sight of those faces; no longer able to avoid imagining their fates. And on Evacuation Day itself, the day the last soldier departed from the quay at Dakhila port in Alexandria, I refused to emerge. Farida went down into the street alone, happy as could be. She begged me to go with her, but I pled exhaustion and was lying on my bed when I heard the sound of the march out in the street—a regular occurrence in those days. Patriotic chants to a fervent rhythm, bidding the last occupier leave, rejoicing in the evacuation, celebrating all true patriots, thanking the resistance, the army, and the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces, and generally being appreciative of everyone’s efforts. It was as though I’d left hell and returned to the mortal coil: no torment, no ignominy, and people optimistic enough to march along and chant from sheer joy. I moved to the window and saw dozens of people gathered in the small street, marching, and chanting, and carrying signs, one beating on a drum to keep the chants in time, and at the edges of the procession people waving at those standing on their balconies and at their windows, summoning them to come down and join in. And I noticed that their numbers were growing, that many were joining the march, and from somewhere nearby I heard another chant, overlaying the chanting down below, and then, suddenly, a second, larger procession appeared out of a side street and joined the first, the pair of them fusing and unifying beneath a single chant, cried out to a melody I shall never forget, and I thought to myself how many hours they must have practiced to get it so perfectly in tune. “O Egyptian!” they chanted. “Mighty Sayyid! Dervish’s son! Does the Nile not flow, does it not run?” And I wept.
No, no, we had not returned to the world. We were still in hell, still in Egypt, and this great coming together of hearts in song was but a prelude to the black anguish that lay ahead. In days, in months, these hopes and dreams of theirs would flay their hides. They would be burned to death. Would be tormented and would repent of what they had this instant been chanting. There were no masters here, no dervishes—and the Nile flowed by, but it flowed in hell: red, and black, and blue, the hues of blood, and shit, and dead flesh. I wept, because for the first time in this life of mine I pitied the people. They imagined themselves to be laying the foundations of a great edifice, yet the truth was that there was no country, no state, no law, nor anything real at all. All this was but an illusion they lived that their suffering might continue: elegant, profound, capable of dealing the severest damage to their souls. I wept because I saw that we were in hell and did not know it, that we tormented one another and knew it not, and that there was not the slightest hope of even a single day being better than the one we lived through now. I clutched the window frame as I wept, and someone in the march observed my weeping, and waved to me, and wept in turn; then those around him noticed what was happening, and they waved to me, and stopped marching, and some of them smiled and some of them wept, and others covered their eyes with their hands. They thought I wept for joy at what we’d done, and in that moment I did not know what we could have done to deserve all this. Would it not have been better to grill us in our skins, as we’d been told would happen, so that we might know that we were being tormented and repent of what we’d done in the mortal world? Yet what was happening evinced a genius far beyond anything we’d conceived. This was a truly divine punishment.
How can a man live in hell once he has realized this fact? How could I still be in torment now that I had no hope in tomorrow?
And for the thousandth time I wondered: does Farida know that we’re in hell? Don’t all these people sense that there is no injustice, no justice, and no mercy here? Do they not realize that all hope is a sham, that every expectation of a better life to come is error, and that things were getting worse and never, ever, better?
On Evacuation Day, General al-Gamali tasked Dr. Khalifa Sidqi with forming a new government and, as always in times of great upheaval, al-Ahram’s lead was sonorous, full of hope, and inscribed in elegant cursive: Dr. Sidqi prime minister for the twenty-first time; reports that the Information Ministry is to be abolished.
Over the course of the next three months, the media, the people, the birds, the street dogs, the stones scattered in the streets, the trees, and their songbirds chewed and savored every last speck of shit spoken about the new constitution, and the new ministry, and the new regional boundaries, and the new parliamentary system (or the new presidential system), and the new army, and the extent to which the people were being apprised of the new budget for the new army, and the new laws, and the new judiciary, and the new fast-track courts which would punish the new criminals who threatened the new security, and the new fifth column, and the new traitors, and the new political parties, and, finally, the new Muslim Brothers.
Of course, there was still humor in hell. I saw this for myself in Talaat Harb Street. A seller was monotonously crying his wares, his voice raised high and his tone mockingly self-aware. Beneath his arm, he held a cardboard box full of shiny golden spoons and around hi
s head was a thin bandana in the colors of the Egyptian flag with some of the same spoons tucked between his forehead and the strip of cloth, sticking upright like a rickety crown. He cried his wares in short sentences, all to the same rhythm, over and over and never tiring, a wave of happiness radiating off him and washing over those around him, so that they smiled and even laughed, not at his idiosyncratic salesmanship, but at the sly insinuation in what he said. It was just before the referendum on the new constitution, and debate was raging and turning to shouting and shoving, a few even beating up those who saw things differently. Outside a shop, by a banner which read ‘Yes to a New Constitution for a New Egypt,’ the spoon-seller drew to a halt and fixed the passersby with the look of a man about to impart a great secret. He was dark-skinned, sweating, and skinny, his huge mustache out of keeping with the small face and bald head, and I told myself he was going to say something about the constitution. We were going to find out if he was for it or against it. But he genuinely caught me by surprise when he resumed his monotonous sales pitch, the short sentences now slightly altered: “Shit spoons! Buy your shit spoons! A present for Mama and Papa, for Hamada and Miyada! Shit spoons for everyone!”
Naturally the new constitution was approved by an overwhelming majority amid fresh scenes of celebration only slightly less effusive than those witnessed on Evacuation Day. The date of the parliamentary elections drew nearer, and in their wake the presidential elections, which it seemed that General al-Gamali would win, sweeping the other candidates aside.
This time around, though, people abandoned hope very quickly indeed.
In just three months, everything turned upside down: the smiles vanished and violence reclaimed its place in people’s lives. They were throwing themselves off rooftops once again, stoning each other to death in the streets, and the vast majority couldn’t care less about what was happening, accepting it all as they’d always accepted it, without the slightest objection. Three months of false hopes and silky words: a short breather in preparation for a greater torment, but without an occupation this time around.
One day, Farida came home downcast because cholera and donkey influenza had broken out again; and because she’d read the Health Ministry report that confirmed that while average life expectancy had risen under occupation, the rates of child mortality had also risen; and finally, because an old disease, once in abeyance, had returned with a vengeance, robbing those under ten years of age of their sight, and hearing, and power of speech.
That day I decided that many must know where we were, but that they were unable or unwilling to speak about it. That they must have found out, as I did, by means of a revelation, its source unknown. That no other man had told them. That everyone wanted to shout the truth of where we were living to the rooftops, but were afraid of being judged mad or unbelievers.
And as for trying to inform people, there was not the slightest point to that. What was the use of people knowing they were in torment? Better, it seemed, to leave people with the illusion intact, to figure out that it was an illusion on their own. And I understood that the suicides were simply doomed attempts to escape. Doomed because suicide is never a way out of hell. You don’t get out that easily, with the stroke of a razor blade, or by jumping down with your neck caught in a noose. That’s just self-deception, as the Saint had said. Even so, I still wondered to myself where people went after they had died or killed themselves.
That very day, Farida said she would go back on the game. The decision had been taken then, although it seemed to me as though she were waiting for my approval, or for my opinion if nothing else, and after a short silence I said that I would support whatever she did. Farida appeared considerably relieved.
Where had the Saint gone? Where had all my colleagues gone?
Every day, I’d go to sleep trembling with fear—knowing that my fear was a torment to me, yet unable to avoid it—Farida lying alongside me, me waiting for her to go to sleep so that I could cry noiselessly and without screwing up my face, weeping for what she would encounter before long: the thing I neither knew nor could see, though I understood that she would be tormented somehow, and that she would torment me with her.
I had to try to get in touch with the Saint again.
4
YET, FOR ALL THAT, THERE was happiness. Farida was joyful, practically flying around the apartment most of the time, where before she’d come in each afternoon depressed and it would be an hour before she’d start to interact me, before she turned back into the regular human being who joked, and smiled, and wanted to go outside and walk among the people in the street.
They were all idiots, she said, and we were idiots just the same. Then she’d start dancing in the living room, spinning on the spot like a ballet dancer, or shaking her belly in the lewd Oriental style, or getting down like a disco dancer from a seventies film. Always something different, and always without music. When I proposed putting on a tune, she said her way was better: she could hear the music in her head and switch genres whenever she got bored, changing dances as she liked. She looked odd, turning and turning—and me hearing only the whisper of her feet on the bare tiles—then occasionally getting carried away, clapping and moaning without realizing she did it. And sometimes she’d smile at me. But most of the time her dance was hers alone. She’d close her eyes and wouldn’t see me, enjoying alone the music that played in her head.
I tried convincing myself that she knew everything, so that I might explain away the things she did: while I escaped by submerging myself in despair, she was trying to fashion for herself another world outside this hell of ours. When she wasn’t working, she danced, went out, and aimlessly wandered the streets.
When she told me that she wanted to go back on the game, I considered returning to the Interior Ministry. Kamal al-Asyuti was now deputy minister for general security, the number two man at the ministry, and he would surely remember me and find me a cushy posting. Maybe he would give me a rifle so I could go back to sniping people from the tops of tall buildings. I was a former officer, and every month I went to the bank to withdraw my pension from my private account. The money I made from leaked information was more than I needed, and for the first time I understood why it was that some people went without, doing just enough to ward off hunger in what they regarded as a fleeting, impermanent world, forswearing their desires in hope of an immortality in the afterlife. Going back to the ministry would have its advantages. I’d have a daily routine to distract me from what was happening, to get me away from melting ice cubes in my hands. More excitement, for sure; maybe more of the killing I’d missed so much. I longed to create an illusion that I could live in, like Farida did. Like they all did.
And at the same time, I was looking for the one way out, for death, but I just couldn’t see how it would work. And though she must have sensed, too, that death was the ideal solution, she constantly avoided it, tunneling deeper into the illusion of the world she’d made for herself, intensifying it to wall herself in.
Before leaving the hospital for the second time, she talked to me at length about a sick boy who was staying there. She talked on and on, and I knew that I was being tormented without a finger being laid on me. I would listen to Farida talk about the boy and summon him to mind over and over again, would dream of him when I slept. And I’d relive the sight that I’d seen through my scope of corpses being robbed, of the death throes that came before complete stillness. I would close my eyes, desperate to escape these scenes, but still they would come—more manifest, sharper.
Someone had left the kid outside the entrance to the hos-
pital. He had been sitting on the ground, naked but for a loose-
fitting robe. Terrified security guards had brought him inside. Breathing was regular and pulse likewise. Blood tests showed that there was nothing wrong with him. But the boy had no eyes. No mouth, no ears. His face had been smooth and featureless except for a nose, and a few days later that nose had turned dark brown and dropped off. He had been
hooked up to a feeding tube that ran into his stomach, and they had had to cut out a section of the tubing to remove the fallen nose. Despite it all, the boy had managed to live a normal enough life. Let out into the garden one day he ran off carefree between the trees. Farida said he would sprint forward a few paces, then change direction and dash forward a few paces more, and so on, managing not to collide with the trees and other objects around him.
They didn’t know his name, so they’d called him Samir after the doctor who’d first examined him and insisted he be kept in the hospital to receive the care he needed. They had found an unoccupied bed for him on one of the wards—and when they had to take the bed for another patient, he had been transferred to the medicine storeroom and laid out on a mattress they’d put down on the floor. In time, they noticed that Samir had lost all his senses, even touch. He no longer twitched when a needle pricked his skin or moved his head when they brought an alcohol-soaked cotton swab to where his nose had once been. Farida told me that one day she’d gone in to see him and found that he’d removed his robe and was lying there, naked, his blue penis lying shrunken and lifeless where it had fallen between his thighs, and in its place a tiny, pinkish hole. Samir’s knees were raised and he was slowly rubbing his heels against the mattress, back and forth, feeling the rough fabric for the last time. But Farida did not cry.
Eventually, Samir had died, she said, and then many more came just like him, all children. Samir had been about ten years old, but the new patients were three, and four, and five. They came accompanied by relatives, who would be weeping with fright, while the patients themselves were always calm, only growing agitated when the tubes and needles came out. When they were brought in, maybe only one of the senses had been lost—they had no eyes, say, or nose, or ears—and then the others would close over or drop off, one after the other, in no fixed order and at no fixed interval. In the end, there was nothing for it but to set aside a whole ward for the sense-deprived children.
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