Chicago

by Alaa Al Aswany

  In fact, recording all of General Safwat Shakir’s professional achievements would require another lengthy book. He kept going from one success to the next until he was appointed counselor (the official and publicly announced title of the head intelligence officer in Egyptian embassies) in Accra, Tokyo, and finally in the most important capital for the Egyptian regime: Washington. He knew quite well that that post was the last stepping-stone to glory, and he worked extraordinarily hard and proved quite successful at it. He saw the forthcoming visit by the president as the chance of a lifetime: if the president saw him and liked him he would appoint him in the next cabinet as minister of the interior or foreign minister or even minister of international cooperation. But if he made a single mistake in preparing for the visit, he would be pensioned off in the next round of appointments and promotions.

  Have we learned everything about Safwat Shakir? There are still two aspects of his life that we have not touched upon: power and women. After many years in which he had absolute power over and control of the destiny of thousands upon thousands of detainees, he acquired a mysterious, well-established, instinctive power that would be hard to explain fully. The nature of his job enabled him to see people at their weakest, made it possible for him to penetrate the most private secrets between a man and his wife, and taught him to crush the manhood of the strongest fighters, to make them prostrate themselves in tears, begging him, kissing his feet so he wouldn’t order their wives to be violated before their very eyes. That deep-rooted, perverse human experience gave him an extraordinary power over those around him. It was as if he had broken the bounds of that invisible domain where all humans moved, acquiring a superhuman authority that no one could withstand. He no longer needed to speak much, and there was nothing that surprised him or made him hesitate anymore. To that should be added his stonelike features, hard chiseled as if they represent implacable fate; his strong, terrifying look that penetrates the heart; his dignified, always unhurried movements that are controlled by a rhythm all their own and which make light of any tension around him; his few words, which he delivers slowly and distinctly; and his very presence, which in itself creates a state of impenetrable anxiety around him. All of those elements magnify his power to the utmost, to godlike dimensions. When he makes a decision, it is irreversible, carrying out the dictates of fate without being subject to them. He decides, with one word or gesture, the destiny of a whole family for several generations to come. The stupendous power that he has would impel one to wonder: Can our wishes change the course of events? If we really and strongly wish for something, can we make it happen somehow? If that were true, then Safwat Shakir’s power is caused primarily by his very strong awareness of it, as evidenced by the fact that he instantly imposes his will on those who do not know his position.

  That power took a different mode with women, the love of whom Shakir inherited from his grandfathers. (Most men in his family had two or more women at the same time as either wives or mistresses.) He remembered from his childhood many quarrels between his mother and father because of his relations with other women. He even remembered that, as a student at the police academy, he had had a relationship with a servant in their house. When he slept with her every Thursday upon his return from spending the evening with his friends, he felt that her body was already fulfilled and content, which created in his mind a strong suspicion, supported by other indications, that she was sleeping with both him and his father. The wild sexual vigor, in both desire and performance, that Safwat Shakir maintained despite being fifty-five, was not due only to heredity but also to the nature of his work. For those who live on the edge of danger — such as soldiers in combat, bullfighters, and gangsters on the run — have burning, insatiable sexual desires, as if they voraciously partake of that pleasure because they might lose it (together with their lives) at any moment, or as if by sexual activity they intensify their awareness of every moment of their threatened lives.

  One of Safwat Shakir’s major peculiarities was the way he went about pursuing and having his way with women. After years of detention without trial, the wife of a detained man would lose hope that her husband would be freed and would devote all her efforts to improving his conditions as much as possible, or getting him transferred to a nearby detention center, or getting medications to him regularly. Under such circumstances, a detainee’s wife would have no choice but to beg the State Security officers, who alone would be able to make the lives of their husbands less miserable. Thus one of the familiar scenes in front of State Security headquarters would be that of a crowd of women, clad in black, standing since the early morning in front of the gate, waiting for hours in silence or chatting in low voices or crying, until finally they would be let in. When that happened, they’d begin passionate supplications accompanied by crying and begging the officers to agree to their modest requests for their husbands’ well-being. The officers usually looked upon these requests coldly and in a bored, almost exasperated manner. Most of the time they rejected them and threatened the women with being detained and tortured themselves if they didn’t leave. Only if the detainee’s wife was beautiful would the treatment be different: they would tell her to meet Safwat Bey Shakir. When they said that, their eyes would gleam with a hidden sarcastic meaning. They knew that their boss loved women and they made jokes about it secretly among themselves, but they still sent him the beautiful ones to curry favor with him. Thus a detainee’s beautiful wife would enter Safwat Shakir’s office, stumbling over her fear and misery. From the first glance he would be able to tell what kind of woman she was and whether she would accept or refuse. He would evaluate her response with one long, unhurried look, scrutinizing her body with obvious lust and at the same time measuring her reaction. The woman would stand in front of him in anguish, complaining, crying, and begging him to grant her requests. If Safwat Shakir realized from his experience that she would say no, he would send her papers back to his underlings to take the necessary measures. But if he felt she was available, he would grant her requests immediately. In the midst of the thanks and prayers on the woman’s part, Safwat Shakir would once again feast his eyes on her charms and say slowly, “You’re a gorgeous girl. How can you do without?”

  That sudden and open transition would be necessary to rule out the last possibility of a wrong inference. If the woman smiled or resorted to embarrassed silence without anger or even whispered in a soft but animated voice, he would be sure that the coast was clear, so he would talk explicitly about sex. At the end of the conversation he would take a piece of paper and write the address of his apartment on Shawarbi Street, then mutter in a businesslike manner, “Tomorrow, at five o’clock, I’ll wait for you at this address.”

  It never happened that the woman didn’t keep the appointment. There were numerous reasons for that: a detainee’s wife, ultimately, was a human being with her desires preying on her nerves with no hope of satisfying them in the near future. It might satisfy her to know, deep down, that a high-ranking officer like Safwat Shakir would want her, which meant that he had preferred her, the poor woman, to women of high society available to him. Besides, by accepting the relationship with Safwat Shakir she would be securing for her husband better conditions in detention. The acquiescence of detainees’ wives, however, could be attributed to a more profound cause, related to the graph that Shakir drew to teach his young officer students. A woman, broken by poverty and different ordeals, exhausted by fighting on more than one front, one who had given up on resuming a normal life, one who was ganged up on by deprivation, men’s lust, and her miserable daily struggle to feed her children, would be like a besieged, exhausted soldier just a few moments before surrender. Such a woman would be driven by a deep desire to fall. Yes, falling would almost bring her relief because it would suppress forever the inner conflict that had often tormented her. Now she would be indeed a fallen woman; there was no longer any room for hesitation, thinking, or resistance. As soon as she entered the apartment, Safwat Shakir would take her to
bed, and every time he would discover that, from the way she had taken care of her intimate details, she had expected and prepared for it. Strangely enough, he never kissed them and often had intercourse with them without a single word. He would fondle their bodies, already burning with desire to begin with, igniting them further to insane degrees, then at a moment that he knew by intuition, like a bullfighter brandishing his sword to finish off his animal opponent, Safwat Shakir would penetrate the women with extreme violence, devoid of any tenderness or kindness, mercilessly. He would penetrate her over and over again as if he were whipping her, as he had done to her husband earlier. She would scream as if crying for help, and in her screams her pleasure would be mixed with pain, or maybe the pleasure resulted from the pain. Roughing her up like that brought her a profound pleasure arising not from the sex but from her being liberated for good from her dignity. Humiliating her by sleeping with her, while despising her, took his contempt to the lowest depths because she deserved it: she was now a fallen woman who did not deserve to be treated tenderly or with respect; he took her as fallen women were usually taken. Once such a woman climaxed, she would cling to Shakir; she never dared to kiss him (for a kiss implied parity), but she would embrace him, cleave to his body, feeling it, smelling and sometimes licking it with her tongue. She’d often bend and kiss his hand as he remained stretched out, relaxed, smoking, his mind far away as if he were a god indifferently receiving offerings from his worshippers.

  GENERAL SAFWAT SHAKIR WAS NOW sitting in his office in the Egyptian embassy in Washington, busily reading security reports that he had just received from Cairo. The office was quiet until the silence was broken by the voice of his secretary, Hasan, over the intercom. “Sorry to disturb you, sir.”

  “I said I didn’t want any calls.”

  “It’s Dr. Ahmad Danana, who came from Chicago to see you, sir. He assures me it’s urgent and important.” Safwat Shakir was silent for a moment then said in a gruff voice, “Let him in.”

  After a moment, Danana rushed into the room, panting and sweating profusely, as if he had run all the way from Chicago. He threw himself onto the sofa facing the desk and said in a hoarse voice, as if crying for help, “Sorry to bother Your Excellency, but there’s a catastrophe, sir. A catastrophe.”

  Safwat Shakir kept watching him in silence as Danana continued in a shaking voice, “Dr. Dennis Baker, my doctoral dissertation advisor, has accused me of forging the results of my research and has sent me up for investigation.”

  Safwat Shakir remained silent. He took out a cigarette from the golden cigarette case open in front of him, lit it slowly, then took a drag and kept staring at Danana, who pleaded in a prayerful voice, “If the investigation finds me guilty, they will expel me.”

  Safwat answered slowly, piercing him with a glance like a bullet, “And what do you want me to do?”

  “My future will be ruined, sir. They’ll kick me out of the university.”

  “And who told you to make up the results of the research?”

  “I didn’t make them up, sir. I had been late doing my research as a result of the assignments Your Excellency gave me. Dr. Baker kept pressuring me to give him results. So I told myself I’d give him the results and then I’d take my time doing the experiments.”

  “You fool! Didn’t it occur to you that he would review the results?”

  “In other dissertations he frequently just reviewed the numbers. And he was satisfied with the numbers I submitted to him,” Danana mumbled. He then went on talking in a soft voice as if to himself, “It almost passed, but, unfortunately for me, he wanted to apply a new idea to the research, so he examined my slides and discovered what I had done.”

  Safwat Shakir remained silent and Danana began to beg again, “I beseech you, Safwat Bey, I’ve been serving the state since I was a college student. I have never been lazy and I’ve never hesitated to carry out what you’ve ordered me to do. Don’t I deserve that you stand by me during this ordeal?”

  “We don’t stand by forgers.”

  “I implore you, sir.”

  “If the university doesn’t expel you, we will. You cannot keep your position when you’re a forger.”

  Danana opened his mouth to say something, but his face trembled and he started to weep. “All this hard work for nothing! All those nights I burned the midnight oil, for what? For a scandal and expulsion?”

  “Shut up,” Safwat, visibly annoyed, shouted at him. Danana took that as a slight glimmer of hope, so he persisted anew. “I beseech you for the memory of your parents, may God have mercy on their souls. Please, Safwat Bey, you are my boss and my professor and I am your disciple. You have every right to punish me when I make a mistake. Do anything you want to me, Your Excellency, but don’t abandon me.”

  Perhaps that was what Safwat had been waiting for. He sat back in his comfortable chair, raised his head, and kept staring at the ceiling in silence until he said, “I’ll help you. Not for your own sake, but for the sake of your unfortunate wife.”

  “May God give you long life, sir.”

  “When is the investigation?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Go to them.”

  “I could get a letter from a doctor and postpone it for a week.”

  “No. Go tomorrow as they want you to.”

  “Sir, Dr. Baker is well respected in the department and they will definitely expel me.”

  “Let them expel you. They have to send us your expulsion decision. We can bury the decision here and the educational bureau will not know about it.”

  “May God give you long life, sir, but I’d no longer be enrolled.”

  “Once things calm down, I’ll try to get you enrolled in another university.”

  That was more than Danana had hoped for. He kept staring at his master’s face then said in a hesitant voice, “I’ll consider that a promise from you, sir.”

  Safwat shot him a disapproving look that almost transfixed him in his place, and then said in a bored tone of voice, “Go back now to Chicago and finish the tasks I assigned to you. Our revered president’s visit is drawing near and we don’t have much time.”

  Danana tried to start a spiel, however short, of thanks and gratitude, but Safwat Shakir once again started reading the reports scattered on the desk in front of him and said, “Don’t take up my time. I have a lot of work to do.”

  Danana sighed and his features relaxed. He turned to leave, but before he reached the door, Safwat’s voice, in a different tone, stopped him. “By the way, I have a request for you.”

  “I am at your disposal, sir, upon my life.”

  Chapter 26

  Carol was so terrified she looked pale. Her heart raced, her breathing became irregular, and she almost fainted as she, with her friend Emily, entered the crowded elevator in a skyscraper overlooking Michigan Avenue. Emily whispered something to the elevator operator and he pressed the button for the thirtieth floor. The elevator made a musical sound before it started up. Carol and Emily remained silent; they had talked so much that nothing was left to be said. Carol posed many questions. She hesitated for a long time and almost changed her mind more than once, but Emily reassured her. She looked at her with a mother’s smile and said, “This is the opportunity of a lifetime. If I were in your place, I wouldn’t hesitate.”

  “I can’t help feeling ashamed.”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you look at it from a purely aesthetic point of view.”

  They left the elevator. Emily proceeded with Carol, following her to the end of the corridor to the right. She stopped in front of a tinted glass door on top of which was an elegant sign: fernando advertising agency. Emily pushed the button and said her name into the intercom. The door soon opened and out came a forty-something man with his hair in long thin intersecting braids. It seemed from his soft movements and the light makeup on his face that he was gay. He was smoking a fat cigarette from which came a strong smell of marijuana. He exchanged cries of welcome with
Emily, who hugged him warmly and kissed him on the cheeks, and then said cheerfully, “My friend Carol. My friend Fernando.”

  “Happy to meet you.” Carol shook his hand and struggled to feign a smile.

  The apartment was big and furnished in a modern, luxurious style. On the walls Carol now saw enlarged snapshots of faces and landscapes that she guessed had been taken by Fernando, who led them through a long corridor, on one side of which was the open door of a bedroom bathed in a soft red light. At the end of the corridor they entered the studio: a small round room with a very high ceiling in the four corners of which cameras of different sizes were placed. In the middle there was a chair, a small table, and a sofa. From the ceiling hung floodlights casting yellow, blue, and red light. Fernando invited them to sit on the sofa while he sat on the chair in front of them. Then he said in a friendly tone, “Sorry for this mess. I’m a disorganized person.”

  “Like all artists.”

  “Would you like an excellent joint?”

  “No, thank you,” Emily mumbled while Carol remained speechless.

  “What would you like to drink?”

  “Anything cold.”

  He opened the fridge and brought out two cans of Pepsi, and then he said in a practical tone, “Okay, Carol, I don’t want to waste your time. I think Emily has told you.” Carol nodded. Fernando went on, “I must see your breasts first, so we can have a constructive basis for discussion.”