Medhat was calm and said, “I had nothing to do with it. It was the party’s decision. Your sister went too far for matters to pass by in silence when we’re in a very delicate time. I asked you before to make her stay at home until the elections were done with and let everything turn out well. But now matters are out of my hands. The decision was taken by my uncle Abdel Rahman Bey personally, and no one can make him change his mind.”
Talaat yelled down the phone, “But that’s insane! Have things reached the point that you’ll lock up your own relatives to stay in power?”
With the same calmness, Medhat replied, “If that’s a question, I have no answer. If it’s sarcasm, you won’t appreciate my answer.”
“You’re only damaging yourselves. It’s a serious political mistake to—”
Medhat interrupted him sharply: “Since when have you understood politics or been interested in public affairs? What’s happened to your respectable family, Talaat Bey? All of you are suddenly into politics? Suddenly you’ve become revolutionaries? Your sister goes to a demonstration and makes incendiary remarks to the opposition press, and you’re giving me lessons in politics and teaching me what’s right and what’s wrong?”
“You don’t need to be a politician or a revolutionary for it to be clear that your days are numbered.”
“I’m sorry, but at that I’ll have to end this conversation.” Medhat hung up.
Mervat asked her husband, “Didn’t you find out where Doha is?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“You shouldn’t have gotten worked up with him. Then you could have found out where she is.”
Absentmindedly, he replied, “He wouldn’t have told me anyway.”
27 Reconciliation
Where’s your brother? He hasn’t come back since he left last night. And now it’s almost sundown and he still hasn’t appeared. Meanwhile, you spend all day yesterday outside the house, come in, and go straight to your room without so much as a hello. What’s happened to the pair of you? This house isn’t a hotel for you to just sleep in without consideration for anyone else.”
Father was really angry and worked up, but Ayman was pleased. His outburst had paved the way for Ayman to tell him what he had being dying to tell someone. Maybe it was Father’s way of asking what had happened on the trip. “I don’t know where my brother is,” said Ayman. “Perhaps he had work. Yesterday I was with my mother.”
The words struck Father like a bolt of lightning. He had never imagined that Ayman would find her so quickly. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean that yesterday I was with my mother. I hunted for her until I learned where she was. Then, as I told you, I went. I spent the day with her. She asked me to stay overnight and rest after the journey, but I preferred to come home.”
“Where did you find her?”
“In Tanta.”
Father began to soften. “Believe me, son, I didn’t know where she was.”
“Yeah, but you knew she was alive and well.”
Father was touched by his son’s words and did not know what to say. There were a few moments of silence, broken by Ayman asking, “Why did you divorce her?”
“Didn’t she tell you?” came Father’s reply.
Ayman shook his head.
“Let her tell you,” Father said.
“She told me that you treated her badly. You cheated on her and kicked her out of the house. Then you sent her divorce papers.”
Father was quiet for a moment. The emotion was visible on his face when he said, “She was the one who treated me badly and cheated on me, so she had no place left with me.”
“Baba, tell me what happened. It’s my right to know.”
“What happened, happened,” said Father with defeat in his voice. “And it was between me and your mother. I’m not going to open that wound again. If she wants to tell you, she will. But I’m not going to talk about it again.”
Father fell silent as if that was the last thing he would ever say. Ayman fell silent too, sad and dejected. Finally Father said, “The past slips away like a thief. Let it go. Don’t rake it up again.”
Ayman kept looking at the face of his father, who had lowered his gaze in silence. Father’s expression was still severe, but he had lost much of his old pride. His beard, a mix of black and white hairs, made him look older. He seemed to have many more cares than his son. They were old, sad matters, ripened by the years and made yet darker and grimmer by the silence.
Ayman decided that from that day on he would not delve into his parents’ relationship and the reasons they had split up. What mattered to him was his own relationship with each of them. He was as protective of his relationship with his mother, whom he had found after years of absence, as he was of his relationship with his father, who had raised him over all those years. The old relationship between husband and wife was no business of his. He would not let it spoil his relationship with either of them.
Ayman felt relieved by his decision. The silence was broken by Father saying, “Forgive me, son.” His voice was quavering and Ayman did not engage him.
He just said, “My life is beginning again. I don’t want having found my mother to cost me my father. Despite all the pain you caused me by depriving me of my mother, I’m still grateful for all you did for me.”
Father and son both burst into tears and Father embraced his son with a tenderness Ayman had not known before.
28 Yes, Sir!
Doha had headed down with the two men in the belief that they were telling the truth. But when she was about to take her car, which was parked in front of the building, they said, “There’s no need for your car.” At that point, she realized she was being arrested. There was an ugly black police car waiting for her as if for any common criminal. They sat her in the back between the mukhbirs and the two men sat up front with the driver.
As soon as the car began to move, Doha quietly pulled out her phone, quickly added her name to the message that Dr. Mushira had dictated, and sent it to the operations room. One of the men sitting in the front spotted her and said, “No. No telephone.” He stretched out his hand and she was forced to give up her phone. The man turned it off and put it in his pocket.
They went over the 6th October Bridge from Mohandiseen and turned right onto the Corniche. They passed Qasr al-Nil Bridge to the right and the succession of luxury hotels to the left. Doha paid close attention to the route so that she would know where she had been taken. When the car reached the Manial Bridge, one of the men handed her a blindfold and asked her to cover her eyes. Doha did so, but left a small gap at the bottom that would allow her to follow the route of the car. They turned left and entered Qasr al-Aini Street. At that point, the car pulled over to the side of the road. One of the two men got out, opened the back door where Doha was sitting, and tightened the blindfold until Doha’s eyes almost popped out. She told him it was hurting her, and he replied, “It’s only a few minutes, then we’ll remove it completely.”
The blindfold was filthy. Its smell was annoying her, and that, combined with the pain in her eyes, made her lose her concentration, and she no longer knew where she was going. After about fifteen minutes, the car came to a stop. The two men who had arrested her helped her out of the car and led her blindfolded directly into a building, where they turned left and entered an elevator. Doha sensed the elevator was not going up, but descending underground. She came out of the elevator and walked a short way with her two companions. She heard the hinges of a door squeak as it was opened. She went through the doorway and heard the door close behind her. Then one of the men told her to remove her blindfold. Doha found herself in a room that looked like a government office. There was a large desk with two chairs and a low table in front of it. A picture of the president hung on the wall behind. On the other side of the room were a leather sofa and two armchairs.
Indicating the sofa, one of the men said, “Please sit down.” Doha’s eyesight was still blurry from the pressure of the bl
indfold, but she could make out the features of the two men and realized that she had not seen them before. They went out, leaving her alone in the room. She looked at her watch a number of times until she could make out that it was three o’clock in the afternoon.
She sat placidly, her mind numb. She could not take in what had happened. More than an hour passed without anyone coming in. Then the door opened and a man came in. He seemed startled by her presence, or had entered the room by mistake. She was about to ask him what was happening and where she was, but he made a speedy exit, shutting the door behind him.
After some minutes, she heard a key turning in the lock. Was it to lock or unlock the door? She waited five minutes, and then went over to the door. She put her ear to it in an effort to discern any sound beyond. She heard a silence unfamiliar in government offices. It was as though working hours had yet to begin. She tried the door, but it was locked. She went back to her seat to wait.
She remembered that the lift had taken her down and not up. Did that explain the frightening silence, as if of the grave? She wondered how many stories down she had gone. How far underground was she? For the first time, she felt afraid. She was facing the unknown, not knowing what to expect or when her ordeal would end, if it ended at all. She remembered what she had read in the papers from time to time about people who disappeared, never to be heard of again. Her fear was made worse by being alone; alone, as she always was at moments of crisis. There was no one with her and no one knew her whereabouts. She wished she had told her brother Talaat or his wife or Dr. Mushira before she had left the house. But she had not anticipated ending up in this subterranean tomb. Perhaps the text message would produce a result, but how could it when she had not specified her location?
She looked around at the forbidding bare walls. She felt them closing in on her, constricting her breath. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes to shut off her surroundings.
Her whole life played out before her, from her childhood and adolescence through her rebellious phase that had quickly been brought to an end by her early marriage. That was followed by the years of mental and emotional suffering and her recent revolt against the life that had been forced upon her.
The drawings she had abandoned on the dining table at her brother’s popped into her head. They represented a total transformation of her creative designs, which were no longer empty aesthetic exercises, but held a new social meaning to inspire the new Egyptian woman aspiring to freedom and fulfillment.
When she had been blindfolded, she had seen completely new forms hovering before her, one innovative design after another. These were a continuation of the moment of inspiration she had had at home less than an hour before, and that had been snatched forcibly away. Doha felt that now she could create designs for a whole show expressing her new ideas. It was as if her unconscious mind, where that rare moment of creation had sparked, was not troubled by her present predicament. As if inspiration transcended time and space and could strike at any time and in any place. Even in prison or in the grave.
She longed to keep working on the designs. She did not know whether they would come back to her again.
Did she fall asleep sitting in her seat? How could she have, when she had slept so well the previous night? Was it the emotional turmoil? Was it a means to escape her fear? She had heard the sounds of torture and cries for help. Had she really heard them, or had she dreamt them? She awoke to the door being opened and a man coming in. He had a look of importance about him; and a subordinate, who might have been a policeman, came in after him. Doha could not tell, as they were both wearing civilian clothes.
“Good evening,” said the man as he sat behind the desk.
“Good evening,” replied Doha curtly.
The man indicated that his assistant should wait outside. The subordinate saluted, said, “Yes, sir!” and went out. The man took a stack of papers out of one of the desk drawers and started writing without looking at Doha.
It was Doha who started the conversation. “Can you please tell me where I am and what is required of me?”
Without lifting his gaze from the paper, the man said, “You are being taken care of.”
“What do you want from me?”
“We have not received any orders concerning you yet. We are to take care of you until your position is clarified.”
“But that’s not legal. You have no right to treat people in such a way.”
The man continued with a politeness that Doha felt contradicted the indecency of what he said: “You ought to be aware that you are receiving the very best treatment. Ordinarily, you should have been placed in a holding cell at a police station with pickpockets and criminals. But here you are, esteemed and respected, in a government office. You must have quite considerable connections in the government. You should realize you are indebted to someone.”
“If I was in a police station, my family would at least know where I was.”
“Not necessarily,” he said, as if talking to himself.
After a while Doha said, “I want to call my brother to let him know I’m all right and haven’t fallen into the Nile or been run over by a car.”
“My instructions are clear: no calls.”
“All the world’s legal systems allow detainees to speak to a lawyer.”
“But you are not detained. No arrest warrant has been issued for you.”
“Well, what am I doing here, then?” snapped Doha.
“You are being looked after until we receive instructions.”
“What instructions?”
“We don’t know. Perhaps to arrest you, or to imprison you, or to release you. Please don’t ask me any questions. I’m as much in the dark as you are.”
“At least let me know where I am.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“What should I do?” Doha said, to herself as much as to him.
The man finished writing and was heading for the door when he said, “My advice is that you wait patiently. Rest assured that as soon as we receive instructions concerning you, we’ll be with you.”
He left with his papers, locking the door behind him.
29 Esmat Bey
The night was receding when Abdel Samad left Esmat Bey’s apartment. Shyly, as if morning were reluctant to break, the sky started to illumine the world. Abdel Samad walked until he returned to the spot where he had been picked up. The scene was quite different. The streets were deserted. The groups of youths hanging around the bridge had gone, and the lions of Qasr al-Nil had a tinge of sadness. Thick mist filled the air, and Abdel Samad could not make out either Saad Zaghloul’s face or a single star in the sky. At the boundary between night and day, there were only stray dogs in the street, quickly crossing the road with their heads hanging low to the ground. He crossed Qasr al-Nil Bridge, retracing his steps, as if by running a film in reverse events could be erased. The streetlights on the bridge were still lit, their glow reflecting off the surface of the Nile, which looked black, as though in mourning. He stopped halfway across the bridge and stared at the water. He recalled the final scene from the film The Beginning and the End. In the same spot, the heroine of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel of that name, Nafisa, who had become a prostitute and whose life had become meaningless and valueless, threw herself into the Nile. Nafisa’s justification was that she needed money to pay for her brother to go to the military academy. Abdel Samad also needed money.
That Esmat Bey was a bastard. A prick. He had not given him the five thousand pounds he needed. A measly hundred pounds that he had flung in his face, saying, “Who do you think you are? Marlon Brando? You’re not worth anything and don’t have any experience.” Son of a bitch! Who did he think he was with his pathetic Charlie Chaplin mustache?
A police patrol went past on the bridge. He felt his back pocket for his ID card. He remembered the day he had gone to the police station to apply for it, and how it had seemed the passport to independence. But rather than becoming independent, he had remained stuc
k in his father’s house. Now his independence day had finally arrived. He had to leave his father, his home, his job, and everyone he knew. No one must know where to find him, since he owed more than he would ever be able to repay, even if he worked for years. Now he had to rely on himself and nobody else. He took the hundred-pound note out of his pocket. A good start. He would go to a cheap hotel in Attaba Square or Hussein and grab some sleep during the day that had not dawned for him.
Ominously, the light of dawn still did not reflect off the surface of the Nile. He felt its waters calling to him, but he turned around and headed off to Attaba.
30 The Minister of Defense
Doha al-Kenani, the wife of Medhat al-Safti, who had dared to criticize the party, was the talk of the town. One newspaper wrote, “Doha al-Kenani disappears in mysterious circumstances.” Another had, “Unconfirmed reports of Doha al-Kenani’s detention.” The paper that had interviewed her published a special issue with the headline “The ruling party consumes itself … Doha al-Kenani arrested for her patriotic views.” The paper also printed a full list of those arrested since the demonstration at the High Court. This comprised more than three thousand people, mostly young men and women.
Another headline read, “Exclusive: From his cell Dr. Ashraf al-Zayni calls for civil disobedience.”
Events went far beyond expectations. Opposition and civil society leaders convened a mass meeting that lasted a whole day. They even agreed on the need to organize and act together. A joint statement, issued in the name of the Coalition of Egyptian Political Forces and signed by the main opposition leaders, demanded the immediate release of detainees.
It was decided to keep the meeting open until the demands were met. As soon as the news spread, people from all sectors of Egyptian society joined in. Within twenty-four hours, the meeting had become a determined popular sit-in, unlike anything the country had witnessed before.
Butterfly Wings: An Egyptian Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) Page 14