Otared

by Mohammad Rabie

  I opened the door and walked out.

  I’d walked these corridors years before. There’s a sense of awe that fills every young officer who enters the building; as I walked now, that awe was still present, but it was not awe at that imposing sanctuary of the Interior’s majesty and influence, nor was it that blend of pride at belonging to this fortress of courage and disquiet at the vast responsibility placed on one’s shoulders—that mixed emotion that dwindles until it disappears in middle age or midway through one’s career to become, by the end, almost preposterous. No, it was awe at not knowing, despite all that I knew.

  I was wondering whether those who walked with me, those around me, the guards and the officers—some tormented, some tormentors—were they custodians of this hell or angels of mercy? Both? Or were these names, and labels, and titles imaginary, unreal? Our understanding of hell was very limited. Were they here in hell for all eternity, or would they at some point go to heaven? And the question that continued to bedevil me until it became a mocking refrain: did they know? But even if I answered them, the questions would never end: every answer was a wrong one, even if it appeared to be right, and it seemed to me that everything bothering me was a part of my torment, from which there was no escape.

  The place was properly air-conditioned, very cold. I took the stairs down, though I could have used the elevators: I was trying to stay here for as long as possible, though for no real reason. Quite impossible that I’d bump into anyone I knew here—the building was too vast to allow for chance encounters—but I was still uneasy; not at the prospect of their questions and their predictable insistence that I return, but at the delusion in their eyes and, even worse—as with al-Asyuti—the expressions on their faces as they devotedly carried out their appointed roles in hell.

  What happened in the police stations was certainly a torment of some kind, as was the grim existence eked out in prisons and the cells of state security where many had died, their corpses tossed into the trash. And then there were the others, the ones who’d gone missing in transit, and us not knowing for sure if they’d vanished into jail’s dark maze or whether they’d escaped into the light of day. . . . The light? There’d been no light outside the walls, just the illusion of it. Even those who’d dropped from the official record and out of sight had been in torment. How was it, then, that I or anyone else could be a mercy, come to send people to heaven? Did we torment them, then later bring them mercy?

  I picked my gun up at the entrance. I was sticking it into my trousers the way I always carried it when the sergeant gave me the thumbs-up and said, “Lovely little gun that, sir.”

  The Beretta has an irresistible magic which works on everyone who sees or shoots it.

  I walked away from the ministry down Sheikh Rihan Street, then turned into Mohamed Farid, making for Sharif Street. Following my frank exchange with al-Asyuti, hell had retreated to the edge of my vision and the world’s illusion was plain before my eyes—as though by telling him that I would not return, I had freed myself from the shackles of reality. What was happening was absurd to the utmost extent. How could illusion free us when we were living such terrible lives? Sometimes I thought that the knowledge I’d been granted was the true punishment, for all that I couldn’t be sure the revelation was genuine or not. I had been lying on my back, a faint pain coursing through my limbs, my forefinger tingling, when I had seen and known, and not a minute’s peace since, and me at first assuming that this knowledge would lighten my torment. Yet those who knew were tormented more than others, it appeared. This knowledge, trapped in my head and in the head of Major General al-Asyuti; Zahra’s few memories that came back to her to open old wounds; our shared desire to escape it all; my burning need to be killing people all the time that had grown stronger after I’d met Zahra—all this, and not a moment’s peace.

  And I asked myself: who shall send me to heaven?

  Sharif Street was on edge. Lots of police vehicles and lots of police in black balaclavas carrying automatic weapons, walking the street in groups of three and looking highly agitated, waiting for the slightest excuse to start shooting. Approaching the brothel where Farida worked, the cops and guns increased: some crime had just taken place here, for sure, and they were here to arrest the criminal. Though there was a chance that Farida might be in danger, I was perfectly composed—the worst fate she’d meet would be deliverance.

  I tried calling, but her phone was off. I tried getting to the building, but the police were firm and stopped me coming closer. As you always do at such scenes, I overheard snatches of conversation: about a murder, about a whore who’d shot at one of the officers and killed him on the spot, about others who’d been killed the same way in the same place. And it was clear to me that Farida had done this. Then I saw a person emerging from the building’s entrance, making for the police van and surrounded on all sides by a great press of officers and troopers. I could not see the person, but I was sure it was Farida.

  The van took off at high speed and passed me by, its lights blinking blue in the blackness. But I was not alarmed, was not the slightest bit shaken. I was tired of hell, I was tired of what I was doing, and perhaps I was happy now that the end was near.

  The case was sewn up tight.

  Farida had shot two clients in her room, who subsequently turned out to be police officers. For some reason, she had then decided to come out of her room and shoot some more people. Fifteen rounds at six different people, and she’d hit them all. The Glock’s lightness and rapid fire had certainly helped. The case was sewn up tight because the two officers had been regular customers, because she’d had a dispute with one of them a while back, and because she’d brought the Glock with her from her apartment. For all these reasons, the prosecutor’s office concluded that this was a case of premeditated murder. The investigators recorded in the case file that the two officers had been killed in the line of duty (which certainly wasn’t true), so the prosecutor appended a charge of aggravated circumstance.

  It happened so quickly: drawing up the case files, turning them over to the prosecutor and on to the courts, and then the start of the court proceedings—all of it accompanied by an hysterical media campaign calling for prostitution to be banned and for officers to be more heavily armed. I was meeting with officers and former colleagues and asking if there was any way out, and they’d grin at me and say that the case was too big now, that it had become a matter of public interest, and good luck. The Saint said that a death sentence was a certainty, and there was no getting around it. It would be a public execution, broadcast nationwide—a confirmation of the authority of the judiciary and the strength of the Interior’s grip. To frighten people.

  I encountered a total lack of sympathy for those condemned to death and executed in the public squares. I heard tales of the impaled and strung-up corpses being subjected to mob stonings, of bodies robbed while they dangled from their ropes, or being dragged through the streets and dismembered—tales more suggestive of savage hordes than of citizens of a modern state. But the state supported it all and quite conceivably the draggings and butchery were being carried out by officers in plain clothes.

  It was alleged that Farida had fired fifteen rounds, then continued to press down on the trigger, aiming the gun at those present inside the building. Down she went, squeezing the trigger in the face of everyone she encountered on the stairs, then out into the street, squeezing and squeezing, and when they forced the Glock from her hand, and threw her to the ground, and beat her so hard they broke two of her ribs, she kept her right arm raised, forefinger crooked, firing from an imaginary pistol as children do.

  She had fired her imaginary pistol at the officers in the Qasr al-Nil police station, at the prosecutor, at the prison guards, at the judge during the opening session of her trial. She squeezed and squeezed that trigger at everyone she met.

  During the third hearing, I approached the cage. I saw her level her fist, finger ready on the invisible trigger, waiting until her eyes met someone�
��s gaze, then blazing away. Despite all my attempts to do so, I hadn’t seen her since she’d first opened fire. She was as thin as always, her expression innocent. She started playing, firing at random into those present. They were all concentrating on the judge and the lawyers standing before him, and ignoring her completely. She turned her head, her gaze sweeping the room, until she came to me. For the first time in a long time, I trembled, and she stopped firing, and stared long and hard at my face.

  She wept quietly, her tears flowing, knowing full well that I couldn’t help her any more. I wouldn’t be taking her in my arms, wouldn’t be concealing her face with my mask and escaping with her, just the two of us together. That wouldn’t happen. And she didn’t shoot at me. She just kept staring. I left the courtroom; I had no need to hear what would be said there. I knew that the death sentence would be issued and carried out.

  I wandered for hours, wearing my mask, shooting everyone I felt deserved to go to heaven. Doing my job with matchless dedication, and thinking about Farida’s fate and what would soon be happening to her—and never for an instant did I feel that she had been hard done by. I was possessed by an absolute conviction that an eternal justice was guiding Farida’s destiny, cleansing her of the sins that had once defiled her in a hell that was not this hell of ours. I wished I could have been a reader of palms, that I might know what was hidden from both of us concerning our past lives: how many times she’d been raped, how many times murdered, how often her body had been ill-treated after death—and these things done not to torment her, but that she might torment others. I longed to see what she had done in the real world. I had once believed her to be the victim of great injustice, believed that what she had done in the world could not possibly justify everything that had happened to her here, but she must have done things too terrible to conceive. And despite all that had happened, and all that would happen, my faith in this justice grew.

  Would those whom Farida had wronged in the world witness what would happen to her? Or would they gain their vengeance without being aware of it? Some surely must be here with us in hell. Perhaps someone she wronged was standing as the judge, looking through her case file, carefully poring through the pages in search of proof and evidence. Maybe he, too, was being tormented, because he was reading so carefully, because he was afraid to be unfair. Maybe those she wronged were even now tormenting her in prison and taking their revenge—or maybe it would be her executioner. And maybe I was one of those she had wronged in the world; I was tormenting her and I did not know it.

  The breeze was light and chill, a contrast to the day’s sapping heat. If only I could hold an ice cube now.

  Once again, my clip was empty—I no longer counted the rounds I carried or those I fired—and I longed for my mission to be at an end, and for rest, rest by any means. For I would be going to another hell to play the same role: an executioner, and a mercy to the people.

  9

  I HAD AN APPOINTMENT WITH the Saint. He’d called me up and asked to meet at the Baron Palace in Heliopolis. I had objected, told him that the place was too far away and it wouldn’t work out, but he had insisted and said that I was going to like what I saw very much indeed.

  The taxi driver told me that Salah Salim Street was blocked for some reason and that traffic was being diverted into Heliopolis itself. He would get me as close as he could to the palace, he said, and I’d have to walk the rest of the way. Nothing I could object to there: it was an excellent opportunity to do a bit of shooting.

  We came to the outskirts of Heliopolis. I had only walked these streets a few times before and I didn’t know them. I was outside the zone of my favored and familiar haunts now, as though I was back on the ground during the resistance: vague missions in strange places. And I remembered how, despite everything, we had arranged conferences and meetings to discuss what we’d be doing in the days ahead, and I remembered al-Asyuti, and the Saint, and many other colleagues, and the endless gunfire.

  Perhaps it was the Saint who’d informed al-Asyuti what I was up to. The fellow had a soft spot for old comrades, and he preferred to meet up away from prying eyes to keep me safe from arrest. The silence with which he had ended our last encounter had been an unspoken blessing, an agreement to keep me doing what I was doing free from restrictions. But I was out in the open now; if I was arrested, neither al-Asyuti nor anyone else would be able to protect me. Indeed, the ties that bound me to Farida—in jail, her story splashed across the papers—might very well come to light. The journalists hadn’t been able to find a single unattractive picture of her, so they’d added spots to a lovely old photograph and turned her wide eyes into slits, and the shot had run in every paper and news site in the land. If they caught me, they’d say I was taking revenge for what had happened to her, but who cared? Nothing mattered to me except roaming the streets and killing at random. The Saint had sounded nervous when I told him that what I was doing was upsetting the ministry, that I was a threat to public order, undermining security. But that wasn’t what was worrying him; he wanted me at liberty to carry out my mission unobstructed.

  I fired off all my bullets in Korba, very close to the Baron Palace. I went into a jeweler’s and killed everyone inside. The broken glass and diamonds mixed together until I could no longer tell the two apart. I walked through the dark of night toward the palace, thinking of killing people with my bare hands.

  A vast crowd stood outside the building, hundreds of people, some wearing masks that covered the whole of their faces, others with surgical masks over their mouths and noses. A few wore gas masks. Were we going to be taking on the police? The Saint was going to get me into trouble. But these people weren’t assembled here to fight the cops. They were dressed comfortably and presentably in the kind of clothes you wear when you go to the park to lie on the grass. There was a celebratory atmosphere and even before I crossed Salah Salim, I could hear the sound of ouds and guitars. I was walking through the crowds, making for the palace wall, and the music was coming at me from all directions, and the sound of many voices raised in song—jarring, fervent, full of laughter—grew louder.

  From somewhere nearby, I heard the Saint call my name, and I turned to see him coming toward me, smiling as always. He shook my hand and we embraced, without my having the faintest idea what all this was about. He was affectionate this time, more so than I was used to from him, wearing nothing on his face but carrying two rubber gas masks in a black bag, clearly identifiable by the reinforced plastic panes at eye level. Inside the bag, they looked soft and crumpled.

  Our conversation was most enjoyable. He chattered about all sorts of things, none of them important, as though discussing what was truly important was a taboo among those who knew.

  The crowd began moving toward the palace. They were gathered in little knots, keeping close to the outer railing. Then, quite how I’m not sure, planks of wood and lengths of corrugated iron materialized in their hands, on which they drummed frenetically as they sang their happy song.

  But the Saint took me aside.

  We walked off, leaving the palace behind us. He was silent, gazing out at the horizon and thinking I knew not what. To our right was the entrance to a long tunnel that dipped down below the road, and a line of classical villas that by worldly standards might suggest luxury, but which appeared to me as empty hulks, glaring out at us. I had met up with the Saint several times over the past few weeks and we had talked a lot, but it was only as we walked down that street that he answered my question.

  Without preamble, he said, “No one knows when the Day will come, but many now believe that the whole of human history has been written in hell.”

  “It all happened in hell?” I asked. “All those lives, lived in hell? I assumed that the Day had already come but our torment was so great that we’d forgotten, or that we’d forgotten it so that we could be tormented with the illusion of the world.”

  He fell silent for a moment, then said: “That’s true. Our memories are dead to us, but closer to
the end we shall recall all that we have lived through. Remembering is our true torment, not what is happening to us right now.”

  I didn’t speak. Once again, I thought to myself that we must come from a world quite different from this place we were in now, utterly unlike our illusion—without streets, or buildings, or walls, or trees—and yet we did not recall a second of our time there, and everything we lived through now was but a hell that we’d been warned of in that former world.

  “The whole business is deeply painful,” the Saint said. “You’ve no doubt wondered whether we deserve this, wondered what we did in the world to deserve to live in this hell. I don’t know if you’ve come to the conclusion that this is justice, but if you have, allow me to reassure you: you’re almost out.”

  I was to leave. At last!

  “But don’t get too excited,” he went on. “You will be going soon enough, but no one knows if he will be departing for heaven or to pass another life back here.”

  I said: “That doesn’t matter in the slightest. Living in hell and being ignorant of the fact is a thousand times better than this knowing. I understand now why people kill themselves.”

  This time, his warning was serious: “That is the greatest error the tormented can commit. Whoever kills himself here shall never go to heaven. He shall cycle through hell after hell and never leave. The suicide is here forevermore.”

  “But it’s still better, Saint. What’s happening is more than anyone can bear!”

  The Saint laughed.

  “You thought living here would be easy? People must show patience. Maybe this time they will leave for heaven.”

  He said nothing for a while, and his smile vanished. Then:

  “I think that people here have come very far indeed. . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the damage done to the souls here cannot be effaced by entering into heaven. These souls will remain weakened forever. I don’t precisely know what will happen at that point. Perhaps we’ll remember everything, and the memory of it will continue to torment us. Maybe we’ll forget—but if we forget, then what’s the point of it all?”