The Republic of False Truths

by Alaa Al Aswany

  “How can you do such things?” the man shouted.

  General Alwany glanced at the goons and they hurried out, then returned holding a woman wearing a torn housedress, her hair dishevelled, her face showing signs of having been beaten. As the goons started hitting her, she began to scream, and the man recognised her voice.

  “Leave me my honour!” he screamed.

  “Strip her!” the general yelled.

  The goons fell on her. She resisted valiantly but they were stronger and were able to rip her dress completely open. When her underwear showed, General Alwany laughed and said, “Now there’s a lovely sight! You’re a lucky man, Arabi, your wife has a padded cotton bra. That type was fashionable ages ago. They called it a ‘straitjacket bra.’ ”

  Everyone laughed at His Excellency the general’s wit and the sarcastic comments followed thick and fast. Then the general said cheerfully, “Take off her bra. What are your wife’s nipples like, Arabi? Personally, I go for the big, dark ones.”

  The goons ripped off the bra, revealing the woman’s breasts, and she let out a single, long scream.

  The man convulsed and screamed, “Enough, Basha! I’ll talk. I’ll talk.”

  Lt. Col. Tareq went over to him and yelled, “You had better talk, you son of a whore, or I’ll have the men string her up!”

  “I’ll talk, I swear by Almighty God!”

  “Are you a member of the Organisation?”

  “Yes.”

  “What district?”

  “Shubra El Kheima.”

  “Who do you report to?”

  “Abd El Rahman Metwalli.”

  There was silence for a few moments. General Alwany took a couple of steps towards the door, then gave a wave to Lt. Col. Tareq and called out to him, “If you’d brought his wife in at the start, you’d have saved yourself a lot of trouble.”

  The lieutenant colonel smiled gratefully and said, “Thank you so much, sir! We learn something new from you every day.”

  General Alwany gave him a fatherly look and said, “Make audio and video recordings of the confession and write your report. I’ll be waiting for you in my office.”

  * * *

  The man had been disguised as a woman wearing a full-face veil. He’d been arrested at the Dar El Salam underground station and from there been moved to the police station where he’d almost been brought before the public prosecutor, who certainly would have let him go. However, a fingerprint check showed that he was in the files, though under a different name, so they brought him to the Apparatus, where he made a full confession. He said he was a member of an organisation that was spread over a number of governorates and he’d been wearing the veil so he could visit the families of members who were in detention without arousing suspicion. General Alwany gave instructions to his officers to have the members of the organisation followed and to write daily reports with any new information that might come to light. The case represented a new achievement for the Apparatus and for its boss, General Alwany, despite which His Excellency’s officers noticed that throughout the day he remained preoccupied—so much so that after praying the afternoon prayer, he’d wanted to be on his own and had told his office manager to admit no one.

  The general lay down on the sofa and began running his prayer beads through his fingers, saying “I seek refuge with God from lapidated Satan!” Why did he feel oppressed? God’s bounty towards him was prodigious: He had blessed him with the sweetness of faith, the strength of submission to His will, and with success in his work. The president of the republic himself had praised the performance of the Apparatus more than once before the cabinet. The year before, when the Apparatus had aborted an assassination attempt against him in Alexandria and arrested all the conspirators, His Excellency the President had ordered that large bonuses be paid to all the Apparatus’s officers and then invited General Alwany to the presidential palace, where he had congratulated him with the words, “Bravo, Alwany! Just so you know, I’d been thinking about appointing you prime minister, but the problem is I can’t find anyone else as efficient to take your place in the Apparatus.”

  Fervently, General Alwany had responded, “Your Excellency is the leader, and I am but a foot soldier whose duty it is to follow orders! I have learned from Your Excellency that I must be ready to serve my country in any capacity.”

  God had granted General Alwany excellent health and an ample portion of daily bread. He lived with his family in a villa that, in reality, was a huge mansion in the Fifth Settlement, set in the midst of fifteen acres of land and including a swimming pool, a tennis court, and an orchard. He also owned a number of luxury villas on the North Coast, and at Sharm El Sheikh, Ein El Sukhna, Alexandria, Matrouh, Hurghada, and Luxor, as well as a 250-square-metre flat in Paris’s Saint Germain quarter, an elegant two-storey house with beautiful garden on Queen’s Gate in London, next to Hyde Park, and a spacious and luxurious flat in Manhattan. He had a number of bank accounts too, most of them outside Egypt (in case of emergencies). General Alwany was also blessed in his family: his eldest son, Abd El Rahman, had become a judge, the middle boy, Bilal, was an officer in the Republican Guard, and his youngest child, his daughter Danya, was a student at Cairo University’s Faculty of Medicine. His wife, Hagga Tahany—companion in the struggle and good luck charm—possessed, despite her advanced years and excessive corpulence, more energy than younger and lighter women. She was a wife who accommodated her husband’s intimate needs at least twice a week and a mother who had raised her children to the point where they were no longer at risk, as well as serving as chair of the board of directors of Start!, an NGO that concerned itself with rescuing street children and turning them into decent citizens. She was, in addition, a committed Muslim, who organised lessons in religion in her home and who had been—through God’s grace—behind a number of people finding the right path. Over and above all of this, Hagga Tahany owned a company called Zamzam, which was one of Egypt’s largest contractors. True, she’d registered the company in the name of her brother, Hagg Nasser Tuleima, but she’d got a defeasance from him (this was a kind of deed of abdication, which she’d registered with the public notary and then put securely away in her bedroom safe, informing her husband of its location, given that “all men’s lives are in God’s hands” and “no man knows in what country he shall die”).

  General Alwany never exploited his office—let us give credit where credit is due—in order to gain any advantage for himself or his family. Were Hagga Tahany to let him know, for example, that her company was seeking to acquire a piece of land from one of the governorates, General Alwany would quickly contact the governor in question and say, “Your Excellency the Governor, I have a service to ask of you,” to which the governor would immediately respond, “I am yours to command, sir!” The general would now say, in tones that brooked no refusal, “Zamzam & Co. has asked to have a piece of land allocated to it. This company is owned by my brother-in-law Hagg Nasser Tuleima. The service that I need from Your Excellency is that you treat Hagg Nasser like any other contractor. Kindly apply the law without fear or favour.” The governor would remain silent for a moment and then say, “Is Your Excellency giving us a lesson in impartiality and integrity?” and the general would interrupt with “Heaven forbid! I’m just an Egyptian who loves his country’s soil, and a Muslim who would never allow his family to become involved in anything dishonest.”

  Later, after the land had been allocated to the company, General Alwany would feel not the slightest embarrassment. He had contacted the person in charge and told him to grant him no favours. What more could he do than that?

  When his eldest son, Abd El Rahman, applied to be appointed to the prosecutor’s office, General Alwany phoned the minister of justice and asked him to treat his son just like the rest of the applicants, without discrimination, and Abd El Rahman had been accepted into the prosecutor’s office and was now a judge on the
South Cairo Court. And when his son Bilal had applied to join the Republican Guard, General Alwany had phoned the minister of defence and begged him to apply the rules to his son without partiality, and he’d been accepted into the Republican Guard and now held the rank of major. By such means, General Alwany maintained a clear conscience before Our Lord, Glorious and Mighty and had nothing to hide or be ashamed of. Why, then, had he, since the start of the day, been feeling oppressed?

  In his heart of hearts, he knew the reason, but was avoiding thinking about it—it was his only daughter, Danya, or “Her Highness the Princess,” as he called her. After he’d fathered two boys, he’d begged God to provide him with a girl. His wife became pregnant, but in the fifth month had a sudden haemorrhage that made her miscarry and affected her psychologically for a while. When she became pregnant again and gave birth to Danya, his delight was beyond description. He chose as a name for her a word used in the Noble Koran to describe the trees of Paradise. Danya induced in him feelings he had never felt before. Hard as it is to believe, General Alwany had left his work at the Apparatus for an entire day in order to accompany his daughter Danya on her first day at the nursery school run by the Mère de Dieu school. When the day came, he’d handed her over to the nun in charge but hadn’t been able to bring himself to leave her there alone. He’d remained huddled in his car in front of the school, following the work at the Apparatus by telephone and calling the nun from time to time to reassure himself about Danya. At the end of the school day, General Alwany had stood in the school garden, watching the door until Danya emerged, in her pink uniform with the little checks and the white collar. She looked angelic. She called out to him, then stretched out her arms and ran as fast as she could and threw herself into his embrace. At that moment, General Alwany almost burst into tears. Believe it or not, this man of steel, who could decide the fate of a family with a word, or even a wave of his hand, was, before Danya, transformed into a sensitive lover who would do anything just to see a smile on her face. Every evening when she was a little girl, as soon as he got back from the Apparatus, he’d hurry to her room to look at her as she slept. He’d contemplate her little fingertips, her nose, her mouth, and her innocent face, even her school bag and her socks and clothes—everything that had to do with her stirred in him deep feelings of tenderness and solicitude.

  Naturally, like any father, he loved his sons Bilal and Abd El Rahman too, but his daughter Danya was the true source of joy in his life. Frequently, he’d be discussing with her about some trivial matter and be suddenly overwhelmed by emotion and stop talking and hug and kiss her. Danya had never let him down and was outstanding, both in her studies and in her conduct. She was always a top student, and when she got her secondary certificate, at the Mère de Dieu, she’d wanted to study medicine. General Alwany had made all the arrangements to send her to Cambridge, but Hagga Tahany had started crying and pleading with him not to deprive her of the company of her only daughter. In the end, he’d given in and enrolled her at the medical faculty at Cairo University and bought her a Mercedes, though he feared for her too much to allow her to drive and appointed her a personal driver. General Alwany was careful, as was his wont, not to overuse his influence, so before the exams he’d phone the dean of the Faculty of Medicine to impress on him that he shouldn’t give Danya any special treatment, and his daughter had gone on getting top scores till now, when she was a year from graduating. He could imagine how joyful he would be the day she graduated and was forever thinking about the next steps. Should he open her a clinic in Cairo, or send her abroad to get her doctorate? His love for Danya could reach strange heights—so much so that the very idea of her getting married disturbed him. How could a day ever come when Danya would leave the house to live with a strange man and share her bed with him? How could she have a relationship with a man other than himself and become the centre of that man’s life?

  He knew that that was how life was supposed to be and that his wife would never be completely happy until Danya was married and a mother, but he often wondered whether there was a young man in Egypt worthy of being Danya’s husband. Was there even one man, other than himself, capable of appreciating her as she deserved? The One True Religion commanded that a wife obey her husband and made her his ward, but where was the husband who deserved to be Danya’s guardian? She was far more refined than any of the young men he saw. She was straightforward and incapable of the cunning and deviousness of other girls and so sincere in her religion that in second year preparatory she’d asked, of her own accord, if she could wear a headscarf. She was good-hearted and pure, assumed the best of everyone and went to great lengths to provide help to all who needed it. What worried him was that Danya’s innocence (which amounted sometimes to naivety) would make her easy prey for any bastard of a boy who might take her in with a smile and a word or two and then do with her as he pleased. How often General Alwany had regretted giving in to his wife’s tears and not sending Danya to Cambridge! Now here she was, at Cairo University, rubbing shoulders with the offspring of riff-raff who were now her colleagues just because they’d scored high in the secondary school leaving exam. And now he was paying for his error. He could ignore it no longer: Danya had changed. She was still refined and well-mannered, but she was no longer the obedient daughter who, dazzled by him, hung on every word he uttered, who seized on everything he said and acted accordingly. He’d ordered one of his most trusted officers to write regular reports on her movements, and this morning he’d read something that had ruined his day. He’d kept putting off talking to her to give himself time to think, but now he couldn’t stand it any longer. He stood up suddenly, ordered his office manager to have the car brought, and a few minutes later was on his way home, having decided to confront her, whatever the consequences.

  2

  Dear Reader,

  You will never know who I am because I shall sign this book with a pseudonym. I am not afraid. I come, thank God, from a family of brave men, generation upon generation. The only thing is that we live in a lying, backward society that adores delusions, and I am not willing to pay the price of others’ stupidity. I have lived for fifty-five years, and most of those years I have spent in deep thought, which has led me to comprehend a number of truths, which it is now my duty to both proclaim and document. The theories that I shall put forward in this book would merit academic study, were we living in a decent society. We are, however, in Egypt, where the serious thinker and the brilliant scientist find no recognition, and where glory—and what glory!—goes to liars and impostors. Let me start my theory with the following question: “What is the essence of the relationship that ties a man to a woman in Egypt?”

  What is the point of all those earnest looks, affectionate smiles, yearning touches, and letters full of flirtatiousness and passion? What is the objective of all those whispered nocturnal telephone calls and romantic sessions on the banks of the Nile? Why do women go to such lengths to accessorise and wear make-up that accentuates their charms, and what is achieved by those so-called “ladies’ ” shoes with the high heels that set a woman’s body a-wobble and bring out its succulence? Why all those dresses and “ladies’ ” trousers and skirts and twin-sets? Why do designs and colours proliferate endlessly? Why do even many religious women who cover their hair wear tight-fitting, provocative clothes, as though they would like (if this weren’t so very unacceptable) to give men a glimpse of the details of their bodies?

  * * *

  —

  Gentlemen,

  This entire dazzling, prodigious firework display has a single purpose: to catch a man and drag him into the marital cage. From puberty on, man suffers from a persistent, painful desire that drives him to chase women and have sex with them and so find relief from the pressure on his nerves from his male hormones. Against this, woman is raised, among us, to think of her reproductive organ as her hidden treasure.

  Only in our country does the press describe a girl who has los
t her virginity as having lost “the dearest thing she has.”

  Think, my dear reader: the dearest thing that an Egyptian girl possesses isn’t her mind, or her humanity, or her life. It is her virginity. That membrane that covers her reproductive organ so as to guarantee that it hasn’t been previously used. To acquire the right to make use of that untouched organ, the man chases the woman, so she acts the coquette with him, asking for presents and jewellery, a dowry and luxury furniture and a large flat in a posh neighbourhood. And the man submits to all these conditions, drooling as he dreams of tasting the pearl that rests concealed in the oyster. Then they marry, the ebullience of the early days comes to an end, and the man discovers that having sex with his wife isn’t the greatest pleasure in the world, as he had imagined. He will be surprised (in most cases) to find that his wife is sluggish in bed or finds sex disgusting and considers it something dirty, like urinating or defecating, so she’ll do it only when compelled, as though carrying out a duty. And the wife may even (and this is the worst) use sex as blackmail, as though saying to her husband, “If you want to enjoy my body, you will have to cover me in presents and give me any sum of money I may demand, and always back me up in my quarrels with your mother and your brothers and sisters.”