Then the shadow went from me—and my visions, too—and the people on my left appeared resigned, the shadow having passed them by, as on my right they surrendered to the shadow.
Then the people fixed their gaze on Sakhr, until we saw none other but him.
Sakhr said, “We have reached the end. There must be punishment.”
And I heard Sakhr say: “This hell of yours will endure many years yet, many years more terrible than those you have seen. This hell will end and another hell follow it, just as another hell came before.”
He said: “After I am gone, you will see seven years of darkness in which everything will perish before your eyes. You shall grow hungry and eat the flesh of dogs, then you shall die and devour one another’s corpses, then you shall despair and eat your children.”
He said: “Then two-thirds of you will be no more. They are living the last of their lives in hell. For he who dies during these seven years shall be free, and he who lives shall be here forevermore.”
He said: “Hope shall be set in your hearts, and hope there is none, and hope is your torment.”
He said: “And the mindful among you are those who see that your hope is false.”
He said: “All who have died this day are now risen, and all know the inner truth of what is and will be. I leave you for all eternity. I shall plead mercy for you, for that which is to come exceeds all limits.”
He said: “Set aside all hope. Know that the end is an illusion.”
Then I saw Sakhr falling back onto his platform, and we saw the last rays of the sun setting at our backs, and all were waiting for the uncles to make their move, and all were content with what they had that instant learned. And the fear had gone, and in its place was certainty.
And I bethought me that I had lived a just life in hell. And I looked to that which delighted me and found it to be the cause of my travails. I remembered carefree days and saw that they were the path to my misery, and I understood that every hour of joy had brought me days of sorrow.
And I considered my prayers and my fasting and I laughed, for there is no prayer here, nor fasting, nor ever any lightening of the torment. All that I possess is patience and all that I fear is hope.
AD 2011
1
MANY TRAGEDIES HAD BEFALLEN THE garbage man. Thirty years ago, he had lost his eye, and the memory of that day had never left him. He’d been sitting at a café in al-Daher when a fight broke out beside him, so he’d gotten to his feet in order to steal a leather wallet that one of the men had left on his chair. The man had spotted him just as he’d grabbed it and made to flee, and had shouted a warning to the others. The garbage man had fought fiercely. Even after his eye had oozed out and he’d known he’d lost it forever, he had still fought on. They’d never seen a thief fight like he did, which is why they all decided to let him go on his way without turning him over to the police.
Working in a plastics factory, he’d slipped a disc, which had put him on his back for a long time, and because of the close ties between plastics and trash he’d been able to leave work at the factory and get a job at a garbage plant—that’s what he called it: a ‘plant’—where household trash was picked and sorted into plastics, paper, and organic waste. Work you only needed one eye for, and ragged clothes—for those who sorted garbage didn’t matter.
There, amid the mounds of trash brought in each day, the garbage man had found plenty of food. He’d turned his nose up at it back then: he was earning nicely, and eating well, and living fine, lots of fucking the women he worked with and even more with the neighbors’ wives. He was a bull: a massive body, a face disfigured from his many battles, and a blank white eye. When he fucked, darkness was the perfect cover for that face.
But the food people threw in the trash kept him up at night: fresh fruit, pieces of chicken still with their meat and skin, stale loaves. He saw millions of scraps of bread. Food a man might pass on, but real food nonetheless. He’d toss it to the pigs and it would be killing him, though this was the best way to get rid of organic waste: pigs would eat anything.
Then they had said that the pigs had a dangerous disease that would infect people and kill them, and the garbage man had dug a deep pit. The plant’s owner had dug with him, weeping bitterly, and when the time had come he’d asked the garbage man to finish the job on his own because he wouldn’t be able to help him. The garbage man had shattered the skulls of the small black pigs with an iron bar, and whenever one had run from him, he had let it go. He’d known another worker would kill it within minutes. It was just a body he wouldn’t have to bury. The garbage man had tossed the pigs’ corpses into the pit, then heaped dirt over them. A few days later, the owner had let him go. He was going to get into another trade, he’d said—there was no future in garbage without pigs—and he’d advised the garbage man to find other work. He had said that garbage was finished.
That day, Insal and Zahra visited two morgues. They viewed hundreds of bodies, and with each one Zahra would turn her head away, would see the dead face and hide hers in his neck, or turn it away to stare out over Insal’s shoulder, her way of signaling rejection or refusal. Then Insal would pass on to the next fridge—or the metal table in the corner of the hall, the simple cot—and stand before the corpse to ask her for the thousand-and-first time: “Is this Papa? Is this Papa? Zahra, is this Papa?” And Zahra would not utter a word. She just turned her head away.
This was supposed to be the last morgue of the day, but Insal still had to stop by Qasr al-Aini, where he’d been told that two new bodies had arrived. There could be something there for Zahra, although she was worn out. It had been another long day: two morgues already, and the return to Qasr al-Aini would be the third. Zahra might fall asleep on the way from sheer exhaustion, but Qasr al-Aini it must be, no getting away from it.
Zahra was limp on his shoulder. Insal stopped for a moment outside the door, staring at the morgue attendant.
Visiting hours were over and many people stood outside the door pleading with the attendant, who was turning them down with a face of stone. They were ready to hand over small bribes, but he refused all the same. He felt no indignation, but he was tired of the way people around him were acting, of their desperation to come in. He had corpses piling up and dozens coming in each day to peer at them, but the number of bodies kept rising: only a few of the missing were ever found. One or two a day, perhaps. The morgue never emptied; the number of bodies arriving just went up.
Zahra had woken up a little. Insal put her down and they walked slowly along at a pace suited to her little legs. They approached the morgue door. The attendant followed their progress, and when they got to the door he opened it.
Inside, Insal launched into the standard preliminaries—“We’re going to look for Papa, Zahra, got that? Okay? Is this Papa? Is this Papa?”—and at each body Zahra turned her face away. Her father’s smell was not here. Not here, except for a very distant trace, a memory, as though he had been present many days ago.
At the last, as Insal approached the final refrigerator
and the attendant opened the final metal hatch, as Insal asked, “Zahra, is this Papa?” the girl stiffened before the days-dead face. It looked uninjured, with no traces of congealed blood. Zahra did not move her eyes away as she usually did. Again, Insal asked her, “Is this Papa, Zahra?” and she replied, “Papa.”
Insal signed many forms without reading a single one of them. He wanted the whole business done with, and signed over all responsibility to the hospital. They would wash the body, would arrange for prayers to be said over it, would bury it in a pauper’s grave. The only thing he learned was that it would be going to the Imam al-Shafei cemetery. Zahra leaned her head against the wall while Insal was busy with the papers, and when he was done he picked her up and walked out.
The attendant had seen many bodies and he remembered them all. He never forgot what his eyes had seen. His memory preserved everything. It could summon up anything that he’d stored away over the ye
ars. He would create images of the dead in his mind, would gather the images together, would sketch them out with faint, translucent lines—lines described in the air against a white background—then lay them one over the other, in as many layers as there were pictures in his head: right eye layered over right eye, nose atop nose, lip on lip. And one lip might be askew if the face was torn up, and parts sometimes missing from the head; and then again, the face might be whole and perfect. The attendant stored thousands of faces in his memory, image on image, layer on layer, and had no idea himself where it would all end, or whether there was an end. His memory now held a single image made up of many images, of thousands: a neutral face with no clear features, just two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, all sketched in loose, indeterminate lines. Now, when a new face was laid down over it, the composite image did not change. Unchanging at last. One face. But of whom the attendant didn’t know.
He would watch the youngsters come happily into the hospital, laughing as they noisily recounted the exploits of the day before—when someone had fired tear gas at them, or when one of them had run away or rushed over to attack the hired thugs. He would observe their delight as they talked about the progress they were making on the street, full of zeal as they walked the corridor to the morgue. One might get overexcited, hopping in the air as he described how he’d caught the canister of tear gas. These kids were plucking canisters out of the air. Their torment was truly terrible, the attendant would tell himself.
As they approached the door, the kids would frown, would slow their pace, would look at their feet. Their voices would grow quiet. One would ask about their missing comrade, then in they’d go and hurriedly look around, snatching glances at the bodies, then on their way again, recounting their absent friend’s heroics. He must be shacked up with his girlfriend, they’d say, in clover, while they were here, beside themselves with worry, searching for him. The attendant would follow their progress down the corridor. Slowly, they’d fade from sight, their bodies becoming identical little flecks, moving dots in torment. They were driven by hope, these ones. They were being tormented as none had been before—the greatest dose of hope the attendant had seen anyone take in his life.
2
THE GARBAGE MAN WAS GENTLE with the girls. They had done his bidding all day. He’d never have imagined that the older girl would respond so readily. He hadn’t bothered with the younger one at all. The older girl would act like a grown woman, would grasp his cock, squeeze it, play with it. The garbage man tried to take the young girl’s hand and teach her how, but she didn’t pick it up like the other one, she wasn’t a pro, and most of the time the older girl would take her place and lead him where he wanted to go. But there was something missing. His pleasure wasn’t complete. The girl’s body was too young. Didn’t do the job. But he treated it as though it were a proper body—better than any image he could dream up, better than the fantasies he’d lived with—and he made himself a little promise: in a few years’ time, she’d have a real body, would be a real woman for him to own.
But the garbage man was thinking ahead. Circumstances could change. She might find herself a handsome, strong, young man with an undamaged face and two good eyes, who walked erect and didn’t stumble. A fellow like this might come along, and they’d fall in love, and she’d leave him. But the young one here would tie her down. They wouldn’t leave together unless two young men came along at once. At this point, the garbage man became truly angry. With all the losses he’d suffered before, the thought of a future without either of the girls enraged him. They were all he had now. Even the trash he ate from every day, piled up in pyramids in the middle of the road, didn’t belong to him.
The garbage man was fed up with his home beneath the bridge. It wasn’t a home, just a place to sleep. What he dreamed of was a place in one of the many heaps of garbage here. He’d dig into the side of one of them, would excavate a tunnel into the center of the pyramid. Nothing to worry about: it wouldn’t fall down and he’d grown used to the smell long ago. He was careful to keep a little rotten food beside him—when he slept, when he sat on the sidewalk, as the older girl was playing with his cock; at all times, in order not to forget that smell. So that he could never smell anything but it. He also made sure to imprint it in the girls’ minds. How could they live with him if they weren’t used to the stench of decay?
When he reached the pyramid’s dead center, he would set about widening the tunnel. A tunnel no longer: he would carve out the middle of the pyramid into two bedrooms and a large lounge. Of course, he’d need planks to prop up the ceiling and walls. He’d steal them from the building site next to the pyramids or from the lumberyard nearby.
He’d be able to dig the tunnel quick enough, four to five months say, though then again maybe a year was more like it, then another year to carve out the bedrooms and living room. Two years after starting work, he would be living in this house of his, and the big girl would be fully grown, and he’d sit on the floor in the living room, leaning against an empty box and waiting for her to fetch him his food. Two years was a long time, true, but the garbage man was in no hurry. What mattered was that no one could know what he was up to. If people found out what he was doing, they’d dig in the other trash pyramids—there were many pyramids, but they’d all be used up in the end—and the whole place, repellent to nose and eyes alike, would be transformed into a busy neighborhood like those around it. And then, any one of them might overextend his living room, and the pyramid would collapse on his head and those of his companions. The garbage man came here to get away from people and from their buildings, which he loathed. He wanted to live in one, but he loathed them all the same. Living here was his idea, and his alone. No one else would ever get a piece of it. He was prepared to kill anyone who threatened the success of this idea.
The garbage man dreamed. A dream of his one and only trip to see the pyramids of Giza. This scene from years before replayed itself, and it was only after he’d woken that he remembered he’d been a boy when he’d visited them and could begin to unpick reality from his dream. He recalled visiting the pyramids with classmates: walking along in a double line of schoolboys, two by two, a teacher at the head of the line and another at the tail. But the dream passed hazily over the reason for the visit and the faces of his companions and skipped straight to the tour guide’s speech: “Pyramids are huge tombs. Dwelling places, too, perhaps. Pyramids could be anything and everything.” So the tour guide had said, and the garbage man had never forgotten his words. And when he woke and emerged from his little house beneath the overpass, he saw the pyramids of garbage ranked neatly and pleasingly in a single line, and birds aplenty circling over them and alighting, and he said to himself, “Those are truly pretty pyramids, fit to live in.”
He finished his daily rounds. He scavenged food for lunch and someone gave him a cigarette. He begged eight pounds and someone gave him another cigarette. He pictured the older girl holding the cigarette and breathing out smoke. He smiled and blood coursed through his veins. He was aroused, his cock stood up, and he looked forward to a fun-filled night.
Beneath the overpass, the garbage man sat on the ground. The two girls lay beside him, and the sounds of the cars that passed by a few meters overhead head were clearly audible. The light of the setting sun bathed the overpass’s metal frame, and it stored the heat away, ready to discharge it into the air once the sun was gone. He was so thirsty. He lifted a bottle of water to his mouth and drank, then went outside to piss against the nearest of the bridge’s columns. When he turned to go back to his little hiding place, he saw a group of young men approaching the overpass. They stood by his house and started peering in at the two girls through gaps in the planks and cardboard sheets. A second group came toward him, watching him very carefully and leaving their laughter behind with their companions, who were now trying to open the little door. They formed a barrier between the garbage man and his home. They were holding wooden staves, short lengths of piping, and cables.
T
hey made him sit down. The sun had set, few cars drove overhead, and there was nobody in the street. Each and every one of them went into the little house and did as he pleased, raping the older girl, who submitted to them all, while the young one in the corner mostly hid her eyes. And the garbage man was outside, and afraid. He wanted it all to end without trouble—for them to get bored or for them to finish fucking her. He could hear her faint squeals and could now anticipate exactly when she’d make them. He felt no sorrow for her.
One of them was penetrating her and she cried out. The garbage man heard the sound and told himself that the cry was surely a cry of pain, but he did not get up and chase them away. They would get angry and might overpower him. He wanted it all to be over quickly. The girl wanted the one on top of her to be done quickly. The men wanted the same thing themselves.
And now the men waiting their turn began to beat him. The garbage man received their blows in silence. Fighting back, he knew, would only provoke them. They were in raptures. They had decided to beat him until they were too tired to go on, and he told himself he’d take it—the garbage he ate each day had left him strong and able to endure. The blows to his head were very painful. After several of these, he could no longer feel the pain or the blood that flowed down his face.
Even after they were done and gone, the garbage man stayed seated. He wasn’t strong enough to stand. From within the shack, he could hear the girl weeping softly.
A maimed tomcat stepped past him. Decrepit, its face blank and tail filthy, it stalked past him very slowly. Very slowly indeed. There were smears of dried blood in its fur. The garbage man reached out his arm and struck it with his fist. It didn’t shy or jerk away like a cat would normally do. The punch shifted it sideways, but it went on walking without giving him a glance. On it went, leaving behind the man, and the house, and the soft weeping, and stepped down off the sidewalk to cross the road, heedless of the cars flashing by before its nose—heedless of the car that tried to stop before it struck. The driver stamped the brakes and the tires screeched. He almost managed it, but then another car struck him from behind and rolled him over the cat.
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