“Can I take your ladder, Ibrahim?”
“Take it.”
The old man knew which way to go. He stepped into the garage and got a battered aluminum ladder from the corner. He put it on his shoulder and carried it back to the dogs. On noticing Amr, he nodded and smirked. He picked up the carcasses of the two dogs and then stood the ladder by the alleyway entrance. Next, he wound the wire cord holding the dogs around the nail on the alleyway wall, and finally brought the ladder back to the garage and put it in its place.
I watched the two hanging dog carcasses dangle in the wind. The old man must have executed only one of them with expertise, since the body of the other was trembling, its legs scratching at the air for some ten minutes yet. Not that this bothered the gathering crowd for even a moment. The sun set behind the Mokattam Hills and the trash heaps were set alight. The flames of the burning trash danced as a huge black shadow on the sooty walls of the square.
Holding the gauze and tape in my hands, I waited for Amr. A huge crowd had already gathered on the Bahtak, people pressed up against each other so you could hardly walk. Once again Ramzi handed me the roll of gauze with which to bandage Amr while he arranged the bets. The Palestinian’s most recent performance ensured that there were lots of takers. The bookmakers were betting four to one against Amr after the previous day’s murder.
In the corner of the square I waited for the boy, not far from the barrels. Amr called out something toward me and then vanished. Fifteen minutes later he turned up, a plastic container in his hands whose contents he was spreading all over himself with fierce determination. I figured it was some sort of oil, and when he got close to me, I smelled the sesame. The boy’s chest and hands sparkled from the oil in the light of the fire.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“We can begin.”
“Allahu Akbar,” Amr replied with a nod.
I bandaged his hands quickly. I took care both to make the wrapping neither too tight nor so loose that it would slip off too soon on account of the oil. On finishing, I gave the kid a slap on the back.
“Be careful.”
He nodded, and left. He sidled his way through the enormous crowd. Finally, he got there and climbed into the ring. The people immediately began raving. They smelled blood. The raving reached its peak when the Palestinian stepped in the ring, too. The cacophony was terrible. The old man had to pound the barrel several times until everyone quieted down enough to start the match. There was silence, and the two boys turned to face each other. For several long seconds they stared at each other without a word.
“What are you waiting for?” someone shouted from the crowd.
“Kill him, Palestinian!”
The Palestinian opened his harelip into a contorted grin and raised his hands to his neck to signal that he would now kill Amr. He then began to jump around him in the ring. Amr moved in sync with him. The Palestinian took some jabs that Amr dodged or blocked.
“Come on already,” the Palestinian yelled, but he could not unnerve Amr.
I saw Ramzi in the crowd. I headed his way and stood beside him. He watched the match in silence.
Both kids were taking rapid breaths in the ring, but still there hadn’t been a serious exchange. Again, the Palestinian took a jab at Amr’s head, but Amr dodged it and hit right back. The blow wasn’t serious, but it was enough to get the blood flowing from the Palestinian’s nose.
“Little Lion!” the crowd shrieked on seeing the blood.
The Palestinian jumped back and wiped his nose with his bandage. I could see the rage on his face even from afar. He charged Amr like a tank. Amr raised his arm in defense. The blows rained down on him. Four of them had slipped off his arm when the fifth caught his upper body. Right where the board had broken on him the day before. Blood spurted from his mouth, and he could not defend himself against the pain. He received three more blows to his ribs before collapsing on the ground. The Palestinian kneeled on Amr’s face, and then Amr’s head knocked loudly against one of the barrels. He lay there on his belly.
The crowd went completely wild, and the Palestinian liked this most of all.
“So, this is the Little Lion?” he asked derisively, stirring up the crowd.
“Kill him, Palestinian!” came the shouts.
Amr slowly stood up, pressing his hands to his ribs. The mud stuck to his oily body.
“Is that all you can do?” he asked.
The Palestinian headed his way and hit his head full force several times, the dull thuds resonating across the square. Amr was again on the ground. The Palestinian went on thrashing away even there, stopping only when he was out of breath.
Swimming in his own sweat, he raised his hands triumphantly.
“This ain’t no lion, this is the son of a dog.”
I turned toward Ramzi, who just stood there in silence.
“This is butchery,” I said. “Can you stop it?”
“Huh?” asked Ramzi, casting me a look of incomprehension.
Amr lay motionless on the ground as the crowd screamed, “Kill him!” The Palestinian passed his eyes over the people.
“What do we do with dogs?” he asked, and the crowd bellowed in reply. Not wanting to see what would follow, I turned my head, so I didn’t notice Amr stand up again. But the crowd suddenly fell silent, so I knew right away that something was about to happen.
Amr stood. His eyebrows were torn up and one of his eyes wasn’t even visible from the wound that covered it. Blood flowed from his nose.
“Is that all you can do?” he asked.
The Palestinian headed toward him, again he pounded away at the boy’s head. Again, Amr collapsed. The Palestinian went on kicking him even on the ground until he got so tired that, gasping for air, he had to lean up against one of the barrels.
“So, stand up now, Little Lion,” he said, panting.
The crowd was raving, and then fell silent once again.
Amr stirred on the ground. He got up on his knees and then, wobbling, staggered to his feet. The Palestinian stood there in shock.
“Is that all?” asked Amr.
His teeth were bloody.
“Is that all you can do?”
Screaming away, the Palestinian lunged at Amr. He hit his face with all his might even when Amr again hit the ground, until, exhausted, he too collapsed on top of him.
“He’s going to kill him,” I said to Ramzi. “Stop him.”
“I can’t.”
The Palestinian got up off Amr and stumbled over to one of the barrels.
“You just get up now,” he said, spitting on the ground.
“Let’s go.”
Amr didn’t move. I watched him lying there on the ground and I couldn’t decide if he was still breathing or not. The Palestinian went on catching his breath for half a minute.
“Mongrels are beaten to death around here,” he finally said. He leaned down to one of the barrels and raised it above his head, and then, as the crowd screamed on, he headed toward Amr. He stopped above the boy.
“Farewell, Little Lion,” he said.
Before he would have been able to throw the barrel on the boy’s head, Amr hit lightning-fast. He got the Palestinian’s balls dead on, and the barrel struck the Palestinian in the belly as he fell backward from the force of the blow.
Amr got up on one knee and, stumbling along, went toward the Palestinian. With his right hand he clutched the Palestinian’s neck, then threw himself backward to the ground, and by the time the Palestinian realized what was happening, he was in a chokehold. He tried kicking his way out in vain. Sitting there, Amr held him tight, and the Palestinian’s hands slipped off the child’s oily skin. The Palestinian struggled for a last breath. Finally, his body stiffened, then slackened. His eyes rolled upward. The crowd stood in numbed silence.
Amr, when certain that the Palestinian was unconscious, let go of his body. That’s when the crowd started raving. For several long minutes Amr sat in the mu
d, a hand pressed to his side, while he was being celebrated. He’d gotten a hell of a beating. Setting off to cut the bandage from him, I jostled my way through the raging crowd. Everyone wanted to touch him. On noticing me, the boy clambered out from among the barrels and put his hands around my neck. He couldn’t hold himself up, so, just like that, I dragged him through the throng of people who kept slapping his back. Only on reaching the corner of the square was there enough room for him to sit down and me to cut off the bandage.
“I won,” he muttered into the air.
“You won,” I replied.
Ramzi came by an hour later, as the crowd was dispersing.
“Are we going?” he asked.
Amr nodded, and tried to stand up, which with my help he managed to do. We set off toward the crypt.
“Was I good, sir?”
“Yes,” replied Ramzi. “It happened like you said.”
“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” the boy replied. By now he was on his own two feet.
“Fucking lion,” said Ramzi, shaking his head. “A fucking lion.”
“That, he is,” I said.
We stopped by a food stand and bought sandwiches.
The child ate slowly.
From one moment to the next he got sick. He stopped, pressed a hand to his belly, and hunched over. He threw up the food and lost consciousness. Both Ramzi and I jumped over. Amr’s lips were purple, his skin gray. I began slapping him, but he didn’t come to.
“He needs to go to a hospital,” I said.
“Like hell he doesn’t,” said Ramzi. “He’s just exhausted. He’ll sleep it out, and that will be that.”
“He has internal bleeding. If we don’t get him to a hospital, he’ll die.”
“Holy fucking shit. Are you sure about that?”
“No. But he threw up blood and he isn’t coming to. He needs to go to a hospital.”
Ramzi just stood there looking clueless, pondering.
“OK,” he finally said. “There’s a hospital by Sayeda Aisha. Help me lift him.”
Ramzi gripped the boy under his arms while I held his legs. That is how we went the length of the alleyway out to a main road. It was packed. Vendors were selling their wares, cars were zigzagging around people as they drove along the dark, dirt road. Their headlights illuminated the fine dust swirling in the air. Ramzi put the child down. He waved for a taxi. The black Lada that stopped had a trash-picked taxi clock from the seventies. We sat the unconscious child on the back seat and moved forward in the vehicle in step with the teeming mass of people. It took a half-hour to work our way out of the muddy streets of the City of the Dead to the paved access road.
The hospital was a flat, sand-colored building. Traffic exhaust had turned the red crescent on its side to gray. This was an Egyptian public hospital, with broken windows, grimy floors sticky from bodily fluids, and faulty, flickering neon lights.
We got out of the cab. Ramzi paid the driver through the window, and then we lifted the child out of the back seat and jostled our way through the throng of people loitering by the entrance.
The crowd was big even inside. The receptionist—a fiftyish woman wearing a headscarf—sat beside an old, colonial-era office desk.
“He collapsed on the street,” said Ramzi.
The woman looked us over.
“You have to wait,” she said.
We waited by the wall, setting the child on the floor. He was as white as a ghost but still breathing. Twenty minutes passed before the doctor emerged. When he saw the child, he shouted. Nurses appeared and lay the boy on a stretcher they then rolled into a room. Another twenty minutes went by before the doctor re-emerged, waving to Ramzi.
“Stay put,” said Ramzi to me. “It wouldn’t be good if they saw a khoaga, too. Your being there would jack up the price.”
I stayed put. Ramzi went into the room. He spoke to the doctor for a long time. Meanwhile a woman was screaming in the hallway. Her belly was huge. She must have been in labor, since she kept invoking Allah and demanding that she be helped. I watched her face, contorted from convulsions, as the nurses finally sat her in a wheelchair and rolled her away from before me.
Not long after that, Ramzi emerged from the room. He was anxious.
“What did the doctor say?” I asked.
“Broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. Internal bleeding. They’re asking for a thousand pounds to operate.”
“Will he make it?”
“I have only five hundred pounds, Abu khoaga. Don’t you have five hundred?”
“No.”
“Then we have to take him away from here. He won’t survive that.”
“Wait here,” I said.
I went into the bathroom, whose floor squelched of piss. I stepped into one of the stalls and removed my right shoe. I took out the insole and, from under that, my emergency reserve, wrapped in tissue. I counted it: four hundred fifty pounds. I put it in my pocket and went back to Ramzi.
“I have four hundred pounds.”
“It’ll do,” he said, took the money from my hand, and returned to the room. This time I didn’t have to wait for long. He was back in five minutes.
“Has he come to?”
“No. Let’s go.”
Without a word we headed out of the hospital, beating our way through the crowd by the entrance, and then we stopped under the overpass by the two-lane road. We lit cigarettes. For a while we just stood there beside each other in silence, smoking. Ramzi reached into his pocket and took out a plastic bag. I immediately recognized the smell of fresh opium.
“Here is your opium, Abu khoaga,” Ramzi said.
“Have the Bedouins come?”
“They have.”
“Terrific.”
I took it from his hand and slipped it into my pants pocket.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
No longer did I have any reason to go with him, as we both knew. We finished smoking.
“Then I’ll be off now,” he finally said.
He flagged down a cab and got in.
“You can give me a ring anytime if you run out,” he said, and gave a wave to the taxi driver.
I watched as the car reached the end of the road, and as it then turned in to Sayidda Aisha Street. I then also held out my hand and caught a cab.
The Bluebird Hotel was just the same as I had left it. The elevator still didn’t have a door. The front desk clerk didn’t even look up from the soap opera he was watching, that’s how he handed me the key. I had to shove in the door to my room with my shoulders, since it was still stuck. I undressed and took a shower. A week of dirt and grime washed off me into the drain. Once finished, I plugged my phone into the charger, opened my knapsack, and removed two cans of warm beer. I turned on my computer, but I’d gotten no messages aside from spam.
I had to work sooner or later, I knew, if I wanted to pay for the room. But I felt too tired just then to be writing to various editors bombarding them with article ideas. I stared at the vibrating monitor, smoked, and drank a can of beer. It was 3 AM, but I couldn’t get to sleep.
Fuck it, I thought, and took out the raw opium. I set it in front of me on the table. I pinched out a larger portion than ever before, placed it under my tongue, and waited for the effect. When my mouth went numb, I clicked open my other can of beer and washed away the opium taste.
By the time I reach the top of the last hill, I already know I’ve been going in circles. I am where I set out from, by the burned city. The view from above is haunting. Nothing but soot and debris. Charred ruins. The steel structures of the buildings have opened up like big black flowers. Black rainwater gathers on black ground and flows into black canals.
The summit affords a good view. For example, I can see, down below, the woman’s tracks, and further on, the woman herself as she drags herself toward the city.
The arsonist hasn’t gotten far. She too has wandered round and round. Her exterior is
no longer that of a predator. Naked, she drags along her wet, swollen body, hands pressed against her belly, in which she carries her progeny. Who impregnated her is a mystery, but the progeny is very big. Blue veins swell on the woman’s giant belly, and the skin on her sides bulges outward. The progeny wants by all means to be born, to be off. The woman is having labor pains. On reaching the first ruins she stumbles to a halt and leans up against the wall. She cries out. Water flows down her legs and, from there, starts heading down the street in a rivulet.
She takes deep breaths before moving on to find a place. She disappears from view. I pick up my pace to keep from losing track of her. I am running down the hill. In no time I arrive where I saw her last. I look for signs indicating which way she might have gone. It doesn’t take me long at all to happen upon them. The ground is covered everywhere with thick, black ash, like snow, revealing her tracks. I pass the city’s train station, charred black by the flames; and then by the big park, where the trees’ black branches stare up blindly toward the sky.
I find her at the foot of a tall pine. Leaning up against the tree, her legs wide apart, she prepares to give birth standing up. She screams. Her face contorts in pain, blood flows between her legs. The convulsions are increasingly frequent, and her mouth is more and more blue. Finally, she squeezes something out of her womb. I can’t see what it is, since it is covered with a slimy, skinlike membrane. It wrenches the placenta right out, too, as it smacks against the blood-squelched ground. The woman breathes a sigh of relief. She faints and topples over.
Minutes pass, and I stare at the woman lying on the ground. She is not dead. Hot puffs of air rise from her mouth as she breathes. I can’t take my eyes off her. I notice too late that what she squeezed out of herself is starting to stir. At first only the membrane of skin is undulating, but it then stretches out. What wants to break out of it must be some animal. It succeeds: using its claws it tears open the membrane and climbs out. By now I see what it is: a big, black dog, bloody and slimy, like a newborn baby. Its eyes shine red in the twilight.
The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul Page 10