Otared

by Mohammad Rabie

  Would I go back to being an officer at the Interior Ministry after the occupation? Would the Egyptian army be rebuilt? Did the remaining officers have the ability to control the borders, to raise the flag once again over Egyptian dominions?

  For centuries, we’d lived under occupation. We’d never fought back, and if we had seen how other nations fought we’d have understood that we had welcomed the occupiers one and all. It’s said we only welcomed an occupier so as to drive out the one before—as though, under the right conditions, occupation could be desirable—and then as soon as we’d expelled the final foreign occupier, the questions began: was it a revolution or a military coup? Were we a socialist state or a capitalist one? Did we only care about ourselves or should we unify with the Arabs? Was it a setback or a defeat? Were we waging war or waiting? Liberalization or law of the jungle? Peace treaty or treachery? Terrorism or state terrorism? Were we fighting terrorism with fire or with enlightenment? Was Mubarak a skilled skipper or a chuckling fool? Had Mubarak’s family brought back the monarchy or did the man respect the constitution? Was this dynastic succession or a son helping out his father? Was it revolution or unrest? A popular uprising or Brotherhood putsch? Would the Brothers rule us forever or would we revolt against them? And then, all over again: was it a revolution or a military coup? Would we tough it out or rise up? Would we abide by the constitution or give the man a mandate to rule for eternity? Would he run against another dummy or take on a proper opponent? Was this unrest or revolution? Is corruption still rampant or is that just a feature of the modern state? Shall we amend the constitution so he can rule us for a third term or make him prime minister instead? And then nearly half a million Maltese Knights had showed up and put an end to all this confusion, all this unintelligible back-and-forth, these debates and discussions, and everybody stopped raising questions, even though we’d heard not one clear answer in decades. What we got was a frank and open and real and honest and beautiful occupation. Unarguable. No more minorities, no more mistreated blocs, no more opposition, no more parties, or fractured parliaments, or flawed elections. We were all against the occupation and no one lifted a finger. When a few individuals took action and set up a resistance whose backbone was made up of former police officers, not one citizen took the slightest interest or offered to help. When people were gunned down by the Knights of Malta, they made no protest; when we killed them ourselves, they did not accuse us of being mad; and when, a few days from now, I killed them, they would shrug their shoulders and walk away. We’d lost the ability to keep going and had turned into speechless lumps. Apathy had killed us and we no longer had it in us to take a stand, as though we were paralyzed or dead. But even the dead protest and feel regret. On the Day of Resurrection, the people shall weep with remorse for what they have done; those in hell shall scream from the severity of their torment—they shall not stand so smug and unresisting when they are tortured there. And Major General al-Asyuti thinks that they will rise up just because we kill a few thousand of them? This man, born in the time of nationalism, assumes that people hate the maze. He doesn’t see that they’ve all sat down and slept there; they’ve settled there and buried themselves within it, beneath its walls. He doesn’t understand that they fell into despair long ago and that now they have gone beyond it.

  But if my maze was to be the price of waking Farida, I would happily have paid it. Wake up, Farida! I want to hear your voice and see your eyes.

  And then I heard a faint knocking at the door. A man I didn’t know, wearing a huge mask in the shape of a horse’s head that covered the upper half of his body, his arms sticking out from the sides of the neck. He handed me a small white envelope and left without saying a word.

  The message was clear: ‘At 7 p.m., send them to heaven. The Tiring Building, Ataba.’ I’d have to play a lot of this by ear, it seemed, but things were in motion.

  I didn’t know exactly where the Tiring Building was, but Ataba was only a few paces from the apartment. I’d walked the route hundreds of times, but I’d never seen that building.

  There was still plenty of time, but I had to go to Ataba to look for the place, then check it out to see where I’d be taking up position, then look for the gun, make sure it was working and zeroed in, and maybe test it out on a few targets. All before 7 p.m. I had to stick to the time and place, but other than that I was free to improvise. For the last two years, all my missions had been like that: just the basic information.

  My tour around the neighborhood lasted less than half an hour. I bought food for Farida, water, tea, sugar, clothes I reckoned would suit her, and soap for her to shower, then I walked home to find her still asleep. There was nothing for it but to wake her.

  At first, her voice was weak, maybe because she’d slept so long, and the first thing she said was, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” Then she closed her eyes, rolled over on the bed, and slowly sat upright. I hugged her. I needed to feel her arms about my body when she was conscious, and she didn’t let me down, clutching me to her, her fingers running over my back. I had to go now, I told her. I’d be back tonight. I told her she mustn’t go out at all today. Everything she needed was here. She must just be patient until I returned. Immediately, her expression turned to one of coquettish irritation, the sham vexation I loved so much, and I smiled, remembering how she used to make that face whenever I said anything she didn’t like. Not that she ever had any real objections, of course; she was just signaling a delicate displeasure without the slightest intention of changing what I would do. This was her way of registering protest, which is maybe why I was so attached to her.

  Farida, I shall return victorious, but I do not promise you that it will all be over soon.

  She padded off barefoot and I saw that in my haste I’d dressed her in men’s clothes: a shirt I hadn’t buttoned, trousers with the fly unzipped. Maybe nobody in the street had noticed the men’s clothes flapping on her body. Maybe nobody had noticed us at all. She walked toward the door of another bedroom, clutching the trousers so they wouldn’t fall, the long sleeves of the outspread shirt hiding her hands, and when she reached the door she peeked inside, retreated, and headed for the bathroom. In the short trip between the two doors, she took off the trousers, and shirt, and what was left of the outfit of lightweight fabric. She went into the bathroom and I saw her straight back, the vertebrae I longed to touch standing proud beneath the skin, and the broad buttocks—yes, still broad—that underpinned it all.

  In the bathroom, she sat completely naked on the toilet and I heard the sound of urine hitting the bowl. I smiled and she said I’d better leave—it wouldn’t smell nice. I smiled again, because I’d embarrassed her. Farida was still shy, despite everything.

  I thought that I should stay with her, that I should abandon the mission, and the resistance, the whole lot, that maybe I should leave the Knights of Malta alone and return to a regular existence with a regular woman.

  She emerged naked, stepping elegantly over the shiny tiles, her big feet at odds with her thin shanks and, as always, I raised my eyes to her big hands, so out of place at the ends of her scrawny arms. I had been crazy to abandon Farida and stay up in the tower, but this time I would definitely be back. I certainly wasn’t going to disappear for two years. Still, I asked myself if she would wait for me.

  I embraced her naked body. I longed to take my clothes off and feel my skin next to hers, for her to take my stiff cock between her thighs as she always did, to scratch my back and neck with her nails, to slap and grab my ass, to squeeze it and tell me how lovely it was, while I laughed and she became more playful still, walking around me and bending down to peer at it, and saying, “Really, your ass is lovely!” But the country calls, Farida.

  I said goodbye and she smiled. She’d wait for me, she said, without any note of blame, or anger, or desire for a fight—as though two years had not passed since our first meeting, as though we had become lovers again in that instant. She hadn’t demanded any explanation for my absence and I hadn
’t demanded any explanation for her terror the night before. This is what happens to us when we see the disasters piling up remorselessly: all the sordid things we do become forgiven.

  Out I went, seeing in my head the cockroaches, heads covered in sheets of newspaper, chests bared, bodies thin, crashing down the corridor to the stairs, all crudeness and overexcitement. I wanted to go back and kill them, and it struck me that in their own way they had been committing suicide. They were striving for death, enraged to the utmost degree, without the slightest hope: all they wanted was for us to see them so—in despair—not that we might pity them, but rather that we might grieve at what they’d come to.

  I stood outside the building and put on my mask. This was going to be a long day and I had to have protection from the outset.

  Ataba Square was a few minutes away, and while my mask was on I didn’t want to seek directions from passersby—that would shatter the solitude I had chosen for today—but I was considering removing it and asking when I remembered my cell phone and the maps.

  Within a minute, the Tiring Building had appeared in the middle of the screen, at the center of a horizontal slice of Ataba and the surrounding area, accompanied by links to articles and reports on the building, and a plethora of pictures of the place from street level, showing the decorations on its balconies and on the dome, which was surmounted by a giant sphere. An historic building. I wasn’t interested.

  I walked until I came to Ataba Square and, glancing around, realized that the building was much more easily spotted than I’d imagined: an old place, its most prominent feature the dome—beneath which was written ‘Tiring’ in Roman script—and above it a huge globe of pale metal borne on the backs of four human figures.

  The choice of building was perfect. Standing in or beside the dome, I could cover a broad expanse of ground. Hundreds of people passed the spot every minute, and I’d need limitless ammo if I was to kill them all. In front of the building were gathered a large group of pavement sellers hawking cheap goods, and lots of people were weaving between the tables, inspecting the wares, and moving on. An impromptu marketplace, with customers and vendors. Plenty of human beings to snipe. I was looking the place over when Burhan suddenly stirred and flew off toward the building.

  No one noticed him. It was 5.15 p.m. The crowds were at their height and business at its busiest; not much buying and selling, but lots of vendors, and passersby, and people fingering the goods. Burhan cut through it all. One or two turned and pointed, laughing. Another, acting the fool, ran a few paces after Burhan, shouting, “Grab him! He’s good for twenty smokes!” Meanwhile, I was walking calmly in his wake and telling myself that people were truly ignorant, but it was no fault of theirs—who could guess I’d be climbing up there and killing them in less than two hours’ time? Maybe they wouldn’t move even if they knew: each one standing there, waiting for the bullets to hit.

  I followed Burhan and went inside, to be surprised by a vast, crumbling staircase, a sign of a splendor that had been erased by the passing years. I mounted the stairs and the sunlight retreated. In the gathering gloom, the stairs were hard to see and objects I couldn’t make out and piles of rubble prevented me climbing quickly for fear that I’d stumble. On the first floor, Burhan jagged off to the right, into one of the apartments. He was zipping through the air, as if hurrying me along. This time I followed him at a sprint, heedless of anything that might trip me, and he turned into a room that was in complete darkness. I switched on the phone’s light and went inside.

  I pointed the light toward the sound of Burhan’s beating wings. His buzzing was a great comfort to me. He was hovering over some wooden and plastic boxes, and the moment I glanced at them I recognized two cases containing sniper rifles, and beneath them a number of smaller containers full of ammunition. Thousands of rounds this time. I opened one of the gun cases to find my favorite rifle, a beloved Dragunov, in pristine condition, still smelling of grease from the factory, and possibly never fired. It was the Polish variant on the classic Russian model, more accurate than its Romanian equivalent. I shut the case and picked it up in my left hand, took a couple of ammo boxes beneath my left arm, and, lighting the way with my phone, I turned around. What I saw terrified me.

  In the far corner of the adjoining room was a gallows: a thick rope terminating in an empty noose and hanging from a short horizontal wooden beam, which was attached to a tall, upright post. For a moment I froze, then I set my load on the floor and walked toward it.

  The gallows’ upright was fixed into a large wooden platform raised a few feet off the ground. Three steps, then I was standing on top of it. The wooden boards creaked loudly and my skin crawled, and with every step they creaked more and more until I thought the platform would collapse beneath my weight. But what amazed and frightened me most was the swaying noose. It was rocking violently as though someone had just set it in motion, or as though someone had been strung up minutes before . . . and yet their body wasn’t there. Directly beneath the noose was a square hole, pitch black, which seemed to be waiting for me. Here the body would drop, falling from life into death. I stood motionless before it for some time. I wanted to hold the phone’s light up to it in order to see what was inside, but something held me back.

  Carrying my boxes, I exited the room and continued on up the stairs. What was left of the daylight and the glow of the streetlamps stole inside to illuminate the vast space. Up I climbed, much shaken by the sight of the gallows. I managed not to think about what it was doing there, or who the last person to use it had been, or why the noose was swaying, and made up my mind that I would not go back to get the other rifle and the rest of the ammunition.

  I had reached the dome. I was standing on the roof of the building, with the dome in front of me and the streets stretched out beneath my feet. I could see everything. Nothing blocked my view but the next-door building, and I decided to keep going until I was stationed not on top of the dome but inside the huge metal sphere above it. I took the rifle from its case, filled three magazines with rounds, then, hefting the ammo box and the gun, ascended the narrow walkway that ran up and over the dome’s summit. I was right up against the four statues carrying the sphere, but I couldn’t tell whether they were meant to be angels or devils, and neither did I know whether the sphere was meant to be the earth, or the universe, or something else, bigger than them both. Looking over my shoulder, I saw my quarry drifting over the asphalt, waiting for me. I eased my body beneath the sphere and up into the large opening in its underside. I was now standing between the four statues, with my chest and head inside the sphere and the rest of me outside—as though I were holding it up like them.

  Inside, I found a chair fixed to a framework of metal rods whose ends were attached to the inner surface of the sphere. The chair was suspended in its dead center. It was hot inside, thanks to the sun, which had been beating down on the sphere all day, and I told myself that it would cool down soon enough and that I wouldn’t suffer too much from the heat. I clambered up into the metal frame and sat down. The chair, I saw, could turn on its axis; it moved, and there were tiny openings let into the surface of the sphere that allowed me to track pedestrians down in the street without a soul able to see me. An ideal contraption for committing mass murder. No lamp penetrated where I sat and I could barely see around me without the aid of the phone’s pale light, but there was no way around it: I had to use up these ammo boxes, every one.

  I took aim at a young man messing around on his phone. Playing some game. The target was in plain view, no more than a hundred and fifty meters away, very close indeed by the standards of my beloved Dragunov. He was wearing a white shirt, all the better to highlight the blood from his wound. I aimed at the middle of his chest, just above the hand that fiddled with the phone, and—making allowances for the recoil, the slight breeze, and the acute downward trajectory—I fired.

  It might have been the most accurate shot I’d taken for a long while. I was used to firing from the top of the tower
, where the shortest distance between the target and me would be over a kilometer, and here I was, shooting over an eighth of that range. From the shot that took out the young man, now fallen to the ground, it looked like this was going to be easy. Five people gathered around, bending over him but not touching him, and I gave myself a little test. I fired at them, then swiveled the chair and leveled the rifle at another target, this time a woman in her fifties walking along with the crowd. Nothing to make her stand out, but I wanted to kill her and I didn’t know why. I shot and she fell down, motionless. Then I killed a middle-aged man smoking a cigarette. I shot him in the face. Then I killed a young man, one of the vendors standing beneath the overpass, and he fell forward onto his wares, knocking them to the ground. Then I swiveled back to face the pavement vendors by the building, and stood upright, braced against the metal frame that held the chair, so that the rifle’s barrel could point more sharply downward. It was easy to keep my balance, and the standing position gave my rifle more room for maneuver. For a while, I surveyed the scene through my scope.