Utopia

by Ahmed Khaled Towfik

  That’s why I remember. That’s why I’m rolling the taste of my life on my tongue, the same way a person gets a bitter aftertaste after emptying a bottle of bad wine.

  I remember things, places, faces, words, lines of poetry, books and smells, but mostly, I remember women.

  Her name was Azza.

  Why do I remember her now?

  Azza used to sell bread on our street corner.

  Azza laughs. Azza moves. Azza scowls. Azza winks. Azza is elated. Azza argues. Azza wriggles. Azza whispers. Azza smiles. Azza thinks.

  Azza sells bread.

  She’d tell me over and again, ‘You read a lot. You’re crazy.’

  I told her that reading, as far as I’m concerned, was a cheap kind of drug. The only thing I did with it was withdraw from my conscious self. In the past, they used to read in order to acquire consciousness. I told her about the romantic poet, Kuthayyir Azza.

  ‘Oh, get lost,’ she told me.

  ‘So I’m lost.’

  She told me that el-Sirgani was a predator who guarded her jealously. That he carried a knife made of a gazelle’s horn that he could run through my glasses. The big guy el-Sirgani wanted her. He thought she belonged to him. After he got his hands on her, he would probably make her work with his niece, Somaya.

  The inevitable day came that we had expected. We were terrified. I wanted to know. She wanted to know. El-Sirgani wanted to know.

  I only remember that he was breathing through his nostrils like a bull. I only remember that he was tearing at the flesh of his forearms and chest with his knife-blade for no apparent reason, only to show me that he wasn’t afraid of anything.

  I only remember the cutting. A cut that started from the upper eyelid, passed through the cornea, and moved to the lower eyelid.

  I lost my cornea. Stupid people say, ‘His eye is ruined,’ but they don’t know what the cornea is. I know a lot of things. Even as the blade was tearing my eye, I knew the anatomical difference between the cornea and the eye as a whole.

  Nevertheless, I confess that I injured him a lot. If you reckon the loser by the amount of blood spilled, then he lost. It’s true that he was the one who injured himself, but what counts is who bleeds more. His friends carried him away as he bellowed like a bull, threatening me with more of the same. Liquor must have been playing with his mind a lot.

  I told her, as she bandaged my bleeding eye, that I wanted a kiss.

  ‘Get lost!’ she said. ‘Your eye is ruined.’

  I laughed in spite of the pain. In spite of the blood that flowed, filling my mouth as I lay on my back.

  ‘It’s not my eye,’ I replied. ‘It’s only my cornea.’

  Her name was Nagat.

  She had a ruined eye like me.

  She had no work, besides stealing from shopkeepers.

  Her husband left her because he tried several times to persuade her to ‘open her mind,’ but she refused in disgust. There was a treasure in his house that could guarantee him a good life, but the treasure refused to be sold.

  One night, he came to her drunk, along with three of his friends. Then he left them in the shack with her and went out for no apparent reason. But she came out behind him, locked them in the shack from outside, and filled the alley with screams and wails. Quickly, every one of the neighbours discovered within himself a feverish defender of morals. There in the shack, drunken human flesh, incapable of resisting, waited for someone to slap, kick and spit on it, which the neighbours did enthusiastically.

  Her husband didn’t dare to return, because, compared to her, he was weak in body and character.

  Nagat laughs. Nagat moves. Nagat scowls. Nagat winks. Nagat is elated. Nagat argues. Nagat wriggles. Nagat whispers. Nagat smiles. Nagat thinks.

  Nagat steals fish from vendors, which is her particular line of work. That was before a good-for-nothing from Badrashin stole her fish.

  ‘Marry me, Gaber,’ Nagat said to me. ‘I’ll be a servant at your feet.’

  I told her that people should only get married to bring someone better into the world. A child more beautiful than you. Wealthier than you. Stronger than you.

  What’s the use of marrying misery to unhappiness? Soot to mud?

  What new thing would we bring into the world, except more misery?

  I told her that in Utopia they deserved to marry and have children. She said that they were rotten sons of bitches. I told her that they were the ones who determined what ‘rotten’ meant, and who the sons of bitches really were. So they had the right to get married and have children.

  ‘Everyone who owns enough to buy dinner for the next two years deserves to get married and have children.’

  Her name was Nagat.

  She had a ruined eye like me.

  Did I find some enjoyment with her? I don’t recall. I only know that I need her now.

  Her name was Awatif.

  Why do I remember her now?

  Awatif was a nurse before their salaries were cut, and before they found there was no point in working. Most of them worked as doctors, treating people for paltry sums. Their medicine is a blend of herbs, honey and folk remedies; sometimes, it’s medication that the inhabitants of Utopia put on the market but never use themselves. And sometimes they use some of the really effective medicines that people working there steal for us, and which are sold at an exorbitant price, including antibiotics and sedatives.

  Awatif laughs. Awatif moves. Awatif scowls. Awatif winks. Awatif is elated. Awatif argues. Awatif wriggles. Awatif whispers. Awatif smiles. Awatif thinks.

  Awatif treated my eye.

  Awatif said that she loved a man who could fight and lose his eye over a woman.

  Awatif said that the men she’d met were prepared to sacrifice her for a cigarette butt.

  Awatif said that I was her man.

  Awatif said that I reminded her of a doctor she’d once loved, who then became addicted to morphine and died of an overdose.

  Awatif was brown-skinned and beautiful.

  She was beautiful. The jewel that nature carefully polished and made beautiful for princesses to wear – and that fell in the mud. A mangy dog picked it up between its teeth and began to run – and run …

  And as I chase the dog, it’s not for the sake of the jewel.

  Instead, it’s because I’m hungry. God Almighty, I’m hungry.

  3

  Fists flew everywhere.

  Punches. Stabs. Kicks. Gobs of spit. Curses. Fists. Blades. Sweat.

  I’m very weak. I have nothing that enables me to face a situation like this. I can only pretend that I’m fighting, like those fake swordsmen who dance at weddings, but I know my limits and I know that it’s what has kept me alive. You have to stick to gangs. Stick to the strong who take what they want. You have to gain their trust, and convince them that you’re necessary. But you shouldn’t attach yourself to them more than you have to, and lose your life when they lose theirs …

  I tried my luck with violence and lost my cornea. That’s enough for one lifetime. I won’t lose a cornea and a nose, or a cornea and an arm.

  Punches. Stabs. Kicks. Gobs of spit. Curses. Fists. Blades. Sweat.

  When I realised we were getting the worst of it, I decided to flee.

  I turned and forgot all about grilled dog meat. I jumped onto the subway track and raced in the darkness.

  If luck was on my side, I’d find the passageway that would lead me outside.

  Someone behind me yelled, ‘Wait!’

  I didn’t know whether it was one of my friends blaming me for my cowardice, or one of my opponents who wanted to catch up with me to rip out my throat. Same difference. I just ran and never looked back.

  In Utopia, they don’t eat dogs. They raise them to pamper them, and for their protection.

  We were like them once, then we learned that dogs were a cheap source of protein. If the revolution happens, we’ll begin by devouring all their fat, pampered dogs.

  This was the passageway. I ran th
rough it and stumbled. I’d lost the torch, but I knew the way in any case.

  There was an old poster advertising a mobile phone – a special offer from some company. This was when there were mobile phone companies, before Mansour bey, the telecoms king, took them over. Of course, no one was interested in us using those things at all any longer, but this part of Egypt was still covered by the network anyway.

  There was another poster for cooking oil.

  There was a poster with a half-naked, beautiful girl on it. Someone had disfigured her features and blacked her out. Someone did that one day, claiming that he had done it to safeguard morals. The truth is that it was a symbolic rape of that beautiful woman, but sexual prohibition was no longer one of our problems today, strangely enough. With all this poverty, the barriers of morality had collapsed, and sex had become the easiest thing to get. Sex for a paltry price, or else rape.

  But in spite of that, I continue to aspire to something else. I aspire to something beyond sex. To that thing that leaves you lying beside her, after your lust is depleted, paying attention to her, and perhaps caressing her smooth cheek with your finger.

  A mysterious affection that I won’t call love. I’m not that naive and starry-eyed. I’ll call it ‘something beyond sex’.

  Azza, Awatif, Nagat …

  I opened the iron gate and emerged into the open air and darkness.

  I carefully closed the padlock so that no one else could sneak in. Those people in the subway tunnels could take care of themselves, and they knew how to get out.

  I was saved by a miracle.

  But I was hungry.

  Later, once I’d caught my breath, I would know if it had been my good luck to have remained alive and hungry, or if it would have been better for me to have died in the dark subway tunnel.

  I don’t know. I don’t have power over death. I’m a bacteria forced to live, no matter what.

  At least there was Safiya. My sister.

  There’s one thing in my life that has remained clean or that I have succeeded in making that way. Once, on the television at the coffee shop, I saw in a Western film a noble knight who was walking with a woman when he came across a muddy puddle. So he took off his cloak and threw it on the ground so she could walk over it and not get her shoes dirty.

  With Safiya I didn’t play the role of the knight. I played the role of the cloak itself.

  That’s why I was alive. I wouldn’t die and leave Safiya to steal or shake her behind, selling the only thing she has to sell. I wouldn’t die and leave her to women who would scratch her face and call her filthy names. I wouldn’t die and let her go hungry.

  I wouldn’t die and let her live without a life.

  The numbers don’t lie.

  For every one hundred crimes of violence against women, eighty-five women are killed.

  For every one hundred female murder victims, there are four who have their throats cut like sheep, and two are burned.

  My beloved cornea – and a dream of something beyond sex …

  I saw everything collapse.

  I warned them a thousand times, but they didn’t believe me; or they believed me, but didn’t care.

  Sometimes I feel that Egyptians are a people who deserve what happens to them. A submissive people, lacking resolve, who bend before the first whip that lashes the air.

  In the past, when I would philosophise, I told one of my friends, ‘Balfour gathered the Jews into one national homeland he had promised to them and, in this way, he rid the world of them.’

  He ignorantly asked me who Balfour was, so I told him, ‘He was a man who gathered the Jews into one national homeland he had promised to them and, in this way, he rid the world of them.’

  A look of wonder appeared on his face.

  ‘Whoa!’ he cried. ‘A man who gathered the Jews into one national homeland?’

  ‘I think there was another promise,’ I continued. ‘There was someone who gathered the good-for-nothings, the sluggish, the bums, and those lacking ambition from the ends of the earth into one national homeland – Egypt. That’s why you don’t find people lacking ambition in Japan. That’s why you don’t find good-for-nothings in Germany. That’s why you don’t find bums in Argentina. They’re all here, my friend!’

  ‘Whoa!’ he shouted in amazement, as he let out a puff of hashish smoke. ‘There’s someone who promised the—’

  He didn’t finish what he was saying, because his head lolled forward on his chest and he passed out. A thread of saliva dribbled down his chin.

  ‘Those people are you, you dogs!’ I used to tell them. ‘Your situation has sunk so low that you’re now eating dogs! I warned you a thousand times! I told you about the theories of Malthus and Gamal Hamdan and the prophecies of Orwell and H.G. Wells. But all you do is get high on hashish and cheap liquor and pass out. Now I swing between sadness over your condition, which is my condition as well, and curses, because only now do you realise. My anger at you is like the anger of Old Testament prophets at their people, one of whom rejoiced and sang when the Babylonians besieged his city. He felt that his honour had finally been regained, even if it would be his last feeling of ecstasy. I curse you, you fools! I curse you!’

  But what frightened me was that they didn’t care at all.

  They were absolutely disinterested.

  They looked for the next woman and the next rolled cigarette and the next meal and they didn’t realise what they’d come to.

  I curse you, you fools! I curse you!

  4

  Safwat works in Utopia.

  He dives into the sewage pipes to unblock them, although the sewage system there is good and carefully maintained. I should mention that those gated communities have their independent private services. We no longer have anything that could be called a sewage system. We make do. Most homes rely on ditches, and there is a cart that empties them out and then gets rid of the waste in a nearby location. Some people have no homes to begin with, so sewage pipes aren’t a problem for them.

  It’s amusing to observe to what extent human necessities have shrunk. In the beginning, there were apartments with telephones, refrigerators, televisions and baths. So people were always complaining about the dog’s life they were leading, where they were forced to watch mindless TV programmes, and getting disruptions in electricity, phone lines and water. When you lose all of that, there’s no longer any source of complaint. So, you see, it’s a special kind of karma. When there’s no electricity, it never gets cut off.

  So let the storm rage. Let the storm rage.

  Safwat works in Utopia.

  Safwat is a sewage-pipe diver in Utopia.

  Safwat reads the newspaper and tells me, ‘They’re going to cancel customs duties on wood imported from the EU.’

  Then he looks at me in confusion and asks me, ‘Is that beneficial? For whom?’

  I give him a summary of my philosophy, which I’ve honed over the course of all these years, ‘I don’t understand what it means, but it’s detrimental to us, and that’s that. Any decision that is taken at any moment is against us.’

  Safwat shows signs of understanding.

  Safwat is in a relationship with a housemaid. Apparently, she’s been struck by the loss of her sense of smell, or by a cold. This housemaid would get phlogistine for him. Her employer isn’t careful with this expensive liquid, and leaves it lying everywhere. She would steal drops from the bottle to get it for Safwat, and he would bring it to me.

  After that, I add some drops of lemon juice to the liquid to give it that smell and that cold sting when you put it on your skin. The centimetre of liquid turns into five centimetres, and I sell it at a sky-high price to our young guys. When they complain that they aren’t seeing the green flames, I tell them angrily, ‘Addiction has destroyed your nerve-endings, you sons of bitches! There’s nothing that can get you high any more, except the pangs of death itself!’

  So they bite their tongues. My words have some truth to them.

  Fr
aud? What does that mean? The best fraudster, without exception, is the one who adulterates drugs. This saintly man works for people’s benefit, in my opinion. He’s a social reformer raking in money!

  Safwat works in Utopia.

  I was waiting for him to come back from there.

  From the minute those two got off the bus, I sensed they were strangers.

  I didn’t know everyone in the neighbourhood, but I definitely knew misery and suffering. I knew hunger. I knew frailty. I’d encountered them quite a lot, so I’d come to recognise them with total ease from a distance, no matter how disguised they were.

  Here I saw fake misery, suffering and hunger.

  I saw fear, which was unusual. In our world you didn’t often see fear; instead, there was a kind of surrender to fate and hopelessness.

  I stood watching them from a distance.

  I saw amazement. I saw disgust. I saw loathing. I saw apprehensiveness.

  All of these are alien feelings in my world. No one feels disgust among us. No one feels a sense of amazement. By age nine, any child has seen everything and been very hungry, and often has been raped three or four times; so you see on his face the look of someone who has seen it all, like an old, experienced prostitute.

  These two aren’t from here, I told myself. They’re not from the Others.

  You can cut my arm off if they aren’t from Utopia.

  I saw the guy walking with the girl amid the crowds and the haze of sweat.

  He stopped when he came to – to Somaya.

  He was negotiating with her.

  He had very bad taste. Somaya was the ugliest girl here: she was closer to a man in his prime, not to mention the fact that her uncle was el-Sirgani himself! El-Sirgani who had ripped out my cornea …

  By an amazing coincidence, el-Sirgani had lost an eye – or a cornea – in a fight not too long ago. Our relationship was no longer as bad as it used to be, but we avoided confrontations. We only barked at each other again whenever we saw each other.

  He wasn’t a thug. He was a pimp. It’s true that his body suggested the first profession, but let me assure you that he was a pimp. He didn’t sell his physical strength and force, rather he sold his women. The only goods he had for sale was Somaya, and of course, she didn’t sell very well.