Otared

by Mohammad Rabie

  Then the black cube clamped down again.

  6

  THE BURLY OFFICER FOUGHT HARD. He took two rounds from my pistol, then the third jammed in the chamber and wouldn’t budge, and I was in the process of removing the magazine when I found the man pressing down on my neck and trying to throttle me.

  He was bleeding heavily and his blood covered my chest, soaking my clothes. How could he still be alive, I asked myself, and cursed the hour I’d agreed to take on an idiotic mission like this. This was before the Tower Group was set up, back when assassinations were still carried out in person rather than at a distance, and killing a brigadier general from the Knights of Malta should have been easy enough. A Helwan automatic, a silencer, and a few rounds were usually enough to see these jobs through, but this brigadier general was more bull than man. He’d realized he was fast approaching the end, I concluded, and had resolved to kill me, to take me with him to hell, and I had a wild thought that the pair of us would be resurrected together in this very pose: his blood jetting from the twin holes in his chest and drenching my body, his eyes glaring into mine, his hands trying to break my neck. I was on the very brink of giving up but decided to give it one last try. Drawing the short dagger from my hip, I started stabbing him repeatedly and at random. I might be a professional sniper, but I was no good with a knife. However, by my great good luck all the blows struck him in the penis and crotch.

  There I was, in the man’s private quarters, him bare naked and the woman, naked as he was, sitting on the edge of the bed. Egyptian, judging by her brown skin and curves—and her state of undress, readily apparent despite the many sheets and covers heaped up on the bed and over her, indicated she was a whore as well, a pro. As I stabbed away at the man I thought that I might give her a few thrusts of my own should the opportunity present itself. As my vision began slowly but surely to fade, I turned my hand, shifted it upward between our two bodies, and opened his belly from left to right. His resistance crumbled instantly and he dropped, perfectly motionless.

  The struggle had lasted a few seconds. Neither of them had made a sound. He was busy trying to kill me and she was dumb with terror, not to mention keen to extricate herself from the situation with the minimum possible damage. I was exhausted, about to pass out, but I wanted to visit one final humiliation on her. I recovered my pistol from the floor, removed the magazine and the jammed round, slipped it back in, and waved her over with the barrel. When she came over, I grasped her shoulder and forced her down in front of me, resting on her knees. With one hand, I pulled down my trousers, resting the pistol against her head with the other. She knew what I wanted.

  I was panting, choked, still feeling the fingers gripping my throat, while she sucked and sucked. To no avail. I’d come erect for a few seconds, then start fighting for oxygen again. As she worked away, I was pressing the silencer’s muzzle against her head. The pistol was pointing straight down and it struck me that if I opened fire the round would penetrate her head and pass down her back, completely shattering her spinal column. As a sniper, I reckoned I was a good enough shot to take out each and every one of her vertebrae in this way. Then it occurred to me that this wasn’t sensible; it was quite likely that the bullet, having passed through hair, skin, skull, and brain, would hit the limp dick in her mouth. Immediately, I pointed the barrel away from my penis. You’d have to be crazy to use a Helwan for this type of mission. You might get an accidental discharge if the gun fell on the floor, the barrel could warp if you fired too many rounds in a row, or you might fire a bullet at a whore’s spine and end up shooting your cock off.

  I got bored of what she was doing and, as she worked away, I began to remove my clothes. It was tricky. I got the shoes and trousers off using my left hand and my feet, then did the same with the shirt, though to take it off completely I had to transfer the gun to my free hand. The blood had saturated the shirt and gone through to my skin, but there was no time to wash or even wipe it off, so I put on the brigadier general’s clean shirt, which was lying on the bed. The whore understood what I wanted to do and, without leaving my cock, she reached out, grabbed the man’s trousers, and helped me put them on.

  Despite her persistent efforts, I couldn’t get it up. Her silence and her ability to suck my cock with me drenched in blood and the corpse lying next to her astonished me. Because her response seemed so natural, I couldn’t think of anything to do that might humiliate her further. Indeed, what she was doing didn’t seem humiliating at all. Now I’d killed the man and was soaked in his gore, humiliation didn’t seem to mean very much.

  She must have thought I wanted to kill her. She started begging me to let her live while she stroked my penis with her hand, not realizing that her wretched face and silly words were doing nothing to get me aroused. She wept as she told me she had children waiting for her at home. All that, and there she was, rubbing my cock and waiting for it to stand up—nothing doing—and then she broke down in tears, saying she didn’t know anything, that she didn’t know my name, that she’d forget my face the moment I left and would say she hadn’t seen it because I’d been wearing a mask.

  I left in a state of collapse, panting from the strain.

  I was walking rapidly, my heart thudding. I tried to appear normal so as not to draw attention to myself. Someone might notice the blood congealing on my chest beneath the shirt, and maybe, too, the fact that the clothes I was wearing didn’t fit me, were far too baggy. I was extremely nervous, and my throat was dry, and when I passed a café and spotted a cup of water on an unattended table, I drank it down without a second thought. Then, on the café’s television, I saw members of parliament voting on the new prostitution bill. People were sitting, following what was happening in slack-jawed silence. Their minds must have been full of conflicting thoughts and emotions: that’s right, the whores are going to get a union; the trade will be licensed; my sister and my wife could go and work in a brothel; if I catch them at it, I’ll kill them for sure; you’ll see, there’ll be ID cards with ‘Profession: Prostitute’ on the back; it’s all because of the occupation, see; yeah, all the fault of the limp-wristed army, the reckless resistance, the “reverlooshun”; yes, we’re a nation of pimps; prostitution’s the solution; the law will protect them, see if it doesn’t; the cops will protect them; well, I’ll have more of a chance to try out what skills I have on a real woman instead of being stuck with myself; better start manufacturing condoms in my bedroom—those things will sell by the million; I knew it, the members of parliament are pimps. . . . I thought to myself that the whore I’d left back there would never find herself in a similar situation again.

  I was one of the first to object to prostitution being legalized. My position wasn’t the product of religious faith, or a commitment to exemplary morals, or the like. The argument I made was that it was impossible for two people to have a relationship completely devoid of love. The first time I stated my case, it provoked raucous laughter from those around me—former Interior Ministry colleagues who’d become comrades in the resistance, my few friends, strangers at cafés. They all offered the same, unvarying response the moment I made my views known, particularly in closed-door meetings with the resistance: a stream of sarcastic comments that verged on the insulting. My belief in the patriotic cause was another line of attack. How, I wondered aloud, could one fight the occupation without a moral compass of one’s own? True, I didn’t actually buy this idea myself, but it seemed more credible than the love thing. Yet the mention of morality prompted even louder laughter. Safeguarding Egypt, or the state, or our values, or love were all arguments we might use to justify our desire to kill, blow up, and destroy, but they had no place as a reason to ban prostitution. Rather, they were a good argument for legalizing the trade and looking after it, for encouraging tourism and protecting the honor of respectable girls. We only ever regarded people as potential criminals. Even the ones who kept their mouths shut were liable to switch at any moment to the antis, to the camp of those who transgressed again
st the law and the state—back when such a thing had existed. The bitter cynicism directed at my sentimental and moral arguments seemed to me to be a frank admission on my colleagues’ part that their position was unsupported by any form of logic or rational thought. Each of us had his own silly justifications and private reasons for his beliefs, and the truth is I never had any real conscientiously held reason for objecting to the law. Maybe it was an automatic response with no thought behind it.

  There had been an organized media campaign to get people behind the bill and ensure they didn’t object. Al-Azhar’s sheikhs, university professors, and intellectuals were silenced. They were the most fraudulent and insincere people around, their inconsistencies and lack of credibility sufficient to irreparably damage any cause they might back. Meanwhile, free rein was given to media figures to gradually begin addressing the matter at hand—weighing the pros and cons of legalization and broadcasting endless segments comparing the experience of European countries with Egypt’s own. Statistics were bandied about in the press, on radio, and on television, clearly showing the decline in instances of rape, harassment, public disorder, and robbery in those countries that had legalized prostitution, and lengthy accounts were given of the stability, peacefulness, and settled relationships of young people who had experienced premarital sexual intercourse. Sex no longer their overriding obsession, they had space for other considerations, more appropriate to long-term marital ambitions, such as the personality and interests of their partner, their patience, their ability to make something of their lives. All this was linked to low divorce rates in countries where prostitution was legal, to which, of course, was added that most distinctive Egyptian anxiety: the fear of a population explosion. It was explained that prostitution would do much to reduce rising birth rates.

  With their shiny suits, smooth chins, and slicked-back hair, the media types had the people on a platter, the very people who greased themselves up in a heroic effort to efface their own identities and replace them with something closer to—more in line with—that of the presenters. Oily fish gobbling their oily prey. Then someone discovered that prostitution had been legalized in Egypt under the monarchy but no one was talking about it! We were so terribly civilized in the first half of the twentieth century! We had permitted prostitution, and the honorable gentlemen of the police had overseen the whole process in their capacity as upholders of the law. But then the coup of 1952 had swept all that cultivation to one side and cast the country into an abyss of darkness and backwardness. I was considerably surprised. Since when had the media been so certain that 1952 was a military coup? Had history changed without my knowing?

  But getting off to a bad start, it seemed, didn’t mean all hope was lost.

  A number of brothels opened within the first month. Fliers were distributed by hand in the street, and elegant neon signs appeared on each brothel advertising the name of the establishment and its rates. They occupied entire low-rise residential buildings, all of them in the cramped alleys off Sharif Street in the center of East Cairo, with the majority located in and around the Stock Exchange district. Abandoned buildings for the most part, uninhabited and in very poor repair, and it seemed as though these sad dwellings must surely house sad women, too—but when I entered my first ever brothel a few months later, I found that things were not like that at all.

  The entrance was air-conditioned, chilled after the heat of the street, and the stairway clean and carpeted, giving an impression of comfort quite different from the unforgiving solidity of the usual marble cladding. On the ground floor, a door stood ajar bearing a sign that read ‘Security,’ and next to the door a second, arrowed sign with the legend ‘Upstairs.’

  I was confronted by a stream of people coming down the staircase, while a second stream accompanied me up. The place had more people descending and ascending than clients and whores in the rooms, and all of them were staring at the floor and avoiding looking at one another. I glanced quite innocently at their faces, but no one met my eyes. Some men were carrying plastic bags and briefcases, and others were empty-handed. There were young men, the middle-aged, and the elderly. There were soldiers from the Knights of Malta’s armies and Egyptian policemen, some currently serving and some former officers, the latter identifiable from the broken look in their eyes. There were men in formal attire with gleaming brogues, and men dressed simply, or in tracksuits, with dusty shoes, wracked with shame and demoralized, no trace of the manly vigor you’d expect to be thick in the air. Eunuchs, listlessly answering lust’s call.

  On the first floor, four doors stood open, one per apartment. I went through the first and was taken aback by the lighting, which seemed to fall on nothing but the whores’ underwear, making it glow. The whores were standing by the bedroom doors. You couldn’t make them out in any detail, but their bodies were clearly beautiful and strong.

  That day, I went into every apartment in the building and examined every girl who stood by the door to her room. The limitless variety took me by surprise—black girls, Egyptians, and foreigners, thin girls and fat girls, and clothes more varied still: nurses’ uniforms in shiny white rubber; militia outfits (also shiny); two-piece lingerie sets; bras large and small; outfits with colored feathers, and gleaming pearls, and fairy lights blinking on and off; men’s shirts worn with nothing on beneath (the most arousing of all); southern peasant robes displaying cleavage that teased and tempted you; factory workers’ overalls, very short and very tight; bras of soft fabric housing jutting nipples; Superman and Wonder Woman costumes; a policeman’s uniform with a truncheon stuck in the belt; an army officer’s with a plastic rifle slung from the shoulder; the distinctive dress of an officer of the Knights of Malta; an English game hunter’s outfit with a pith helmet and a stubby black whip in hand; a very loose and very short instance of a Delta peasant’s traditional attire; a judge with a shiny pink ribbon of office; a pigtailed schoolgirl in big, black-rimmed glasses; an early-twentieth-century dandy in black suit and tarboosh, a thin black mustache penciled onto the beautiful, female face; and reams and reams of underwear and nightgowns.

  On the fifth floor, all the freaks were gathered: real whips snapping through the air at regular intervals, stun batons that crackled and glowed with soft blue sparks, shoes with towering heels both thick and thin, the tiniest possible bras, the stiff dildo that a whore wore at her waist and waggled to entice the passersby, a crown of red, yellow, and black feathers and a tailpiece of very long feathers poking out behind (I couldn’t see any leather straps holding the tail in place, but when the whore turned around and bent over I saw they were fixed into a black plastic plug protruding from her anus). There were flat-chested girls with massive buttocks, and others with huge breasts and flat behinds. Girls so young they seemed as if they’d come of age just yesterday, and women with slack tits that had nursed many children. By the end, I had seen them all and I hadn’t wanted one.

  Overwhelmed, I hurried downstairs, as though fleeing these dozens of female bodies that had failed to arouse me in the slightest. Coming to the ground floor, I saw Farida for the first time. And somehow I knew I would spend the night with her.

  She was mounting the stairs with unfeigned boredom, holding a bag that might have contained clothes or a costume like the ones I’d seen upstairs. I stopped, trying to catch a glimpse of her features, and I smiled, because I’d had a purely adolescent thought: that this girl would leave her terrible job and marry me because she loved me. I’d forget her shameful past and she’d ignore all my faults. But she didn’t look at me. I was just another john going up and down the stairs on Sharif Street.

  Later on, Farida told me that she had thought I’d finished what I’d come for, so she hadn’t looked at me, sparing me the glance she turned on clients to catch their attention. Farida wasn’t so very beautiful. She had a skinny body and sallow brown skin that hinted at some permanent medical condition or malnutrition. A boyish figure, but for a broad ass that seemed to belong to another body altogether. But I was capt
ivated by her short hair, and likewise by her prominent cheekbones and her long, almost pharaonic face. She stopped and stared at someone coming down behind me. I heard his slow tread on the stairs, muffled by the carpet, and—detecting the beginnings of a mocking, not flirtatious, smile—the fellow shuffled past me. An old man, squat and bald, carrying a huge bag full of children’s teddies and dolls: Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, and Rabbit, plus others I didn’t know, and red plush hearts like those sold for Valentine’s Day, the whole collection nearly spilling from the vast bag. I looked at him in astonishment, furious at him for ruining the moment, and she watched him flatly as he passed her by. “The man wants a nanny,” she declared.

  I followed her up to the first floor, where she went into one of the apartments, then into a bedroom at the back. Beset by the glances of her fellow whores, I waited until she reemerged, dressed in an outfit that covered her body from top to bottom. It was a very thin, translucent shift of fine black thread, like the fabric used for those semi-transparent lightweight tights, and it showed off the slenderness of her legs and waist, the broad curve of her behind, and the modest rounds of her two small breasts, whose nipples she covered with her forearm in compliance with house rules (Nipples may not be shown outside the rooms), while the hand of her loose arm reached down to shield her cunt—a substantial fig leaf that went with her two big feet. Later, I would see her breasts and notice that her left breast was missing its nipple, and I would discover the small scar that took its place. This was the cleverest ruse in the whole joint: she was naked and yet not. Wearing something that exposed her body, yet still covering what might otherwise be seen clearly. A mature woman, yet slight as a teenager. Her hair was light brown, yet it gleamed in the darkness. A face sharp as a boy’s, but with lips that urged you on.