I could think of nothing to say. He halted, and I halted, and from afar came the sound of metal being struck. No, not metal: the sound of bare feet thudding on the ground.
“Otared,” the Saint said, “be sure to kill as many as you can. The end is very near now, you can’t imagine how near. Don’t waste any opportunity to kill, for what is coming is worse than you can conceive.”
“How will it happen?” I asked.
The sound grew louder as it approached. He raised his head, trying to see if anything was moving off in the distance, and I did likewise, but we saw nothing.
Speaking rapidly as he peered down the length of the street, he said, “I’ve no idea, of course. Maybe those who witness the end will see what no man has ever seen before. Maybe the end will be kind to us both. Maybe we shall stay in hell forever. All that’s certain is that you are to send people straight to heaven.”
“Will we see the end together?” I asked.
Rushing his words now, he said, “I’m sure we will see everything right up until the final moment. Maybe we won’t see it together, but we’ll both see it for sure.”
The sounds were very close now and the Saint’s body tensed. He started jigging up and down, little hops, staring at the nearby intersection on our left. Then he looked at me and said, “Can you run?”
A pack of dogs appeared, running at great speed. As they exited the intersection, their momentum carried them straight ahead, but they quickly altered course and made directly for us, six or seven of them. And no sooner had that happened than a second pack appeared at the very same intersection: much larger, it seemed, endless, all the dogs of Cairo running together in a single stream.
The Saint clutched my arm.
“Run! Run for the palace!”
We ran, the dogs closing on us very quickly. Our walk hadn’t taken us too far from the palace. I could hear the dogs closing on us as we ran, and it struck me that I hadn’t heard them bark once.
Before us was a group of people gathered behind a wall that they’d constructed from wooden planking and short lengths of corrugated iron—enough cover to hide behind but sufficiently low to see over—into which they’d opened plank-lined passages leading to the palace. The knots of people were like tongues of flesh in a black ocean of asphalt. As we drew closer, those behind the wall removed two boards from the front of the structure and waved their arms, inviting us inside. Together we ran for the entrance, and so great was our speed that we collided with those waiting on the other side. Then they replaced the boards and the barrier was restored, a wall to keep the dogs from touching us.
At first, a great number of dogs smashed into the wooden wall. The boards shivered in the hands of those standing behind them and almost broke apart, but in less than a minute the dogs had figured it out and were running down the passageways toward the palace. The torrent of dogs was tremendous, thousands of bodies rushing by as I stood behind the boards, pouring out of Heliopolis and Salah Salim Street and whipping past, caring for nothing, not stopping or turning, not barking, noiseless but for the scrape of their paws on asphalt.
The head of the river breached the palace’s outer railing and entered the building itself, even as its body still roared down the passageways between the knots of people, and then they were through the entrance and inside in their hundreds, dogs spilling from windows and balconies, tails and heads piling up, the rooms on the ground floor full to bursting while more dogs ran past us outside.
A long time passed, maybe half an hour, before the great torrent of dogs began to slacken and the last groups of stragglers appeared, sprinting toward a palace that was
now completely crammed, the remaining dogs thronging around it.
Silence descended and many of us put on our masks in readiness for whatever was coming next—everything was unexpected. I looked around for the Saint and spotted him a few meters away. I called his name and he came toward me, and I to him, and as we met I asked, “What now?”
“This is what I told you about. Now the palace will collapse.”
I lifted my eyes to the old ornamental façade and said to myself that a building like this must be indestructible, that it would never come down.
“Everyone around us knows that this will happen,” the Saint went on. “They’ve all come to see the show.”
His words seemed strange, but I’d grown accustomed to all the strange things happening around me. Patting my shoulder, he said, “Don’t worry. They all know. You’re among friends, Otared.”
And indeed I did feel much better. I was among those who knew; one of them, standing with them. I was about to ask the Saint if this was to be the end, but the roar of the palace’s collapse prevented me from talking. The internal walls and ceilings were the first to fall, then the dome caved in, then the outer walls subsided onto the dogs milling around the outside of the palace. As the ground quaked beneath our feet and a tremendous noise stopped our ears, a cloud of dust rose dozens of meters into the air. Then the dust cloud reached us, smelling of rain, and enveloped us completely.
I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the fate of the dogs. No doubt they’d all perished beneath the rubble.
The crowd calmly dispersed, walking off with a bare minimum of handshakes and clipped farewells, and were gone. The Saint lit a cigarette.
“The dogs are dead, my friend. Tomorrow’s the end.”
*
I walked away in the direction of central Heliopolis. I walked and walked, got lost down streets that all looked alike and amid old houses, until I came to a place with a great park and tall buildings. There, I followed the metro’s tracks, before deciding to risk a detour into the maze of side streets. I was getting lost on purpose.
But these streets weren’t entirely unfamiliar. I’d seen them, or ones like them, before, though I couldn’t remember the names. This was a dark street with spare little trees hanging over the walls of the houses on either side. The streetlamps were off, and the light from a shop door shone white and uncommonly brightly in the distance. There were no pedestrians here. No cars. I thought that I might sleep there on the sidewalk and nobody would bother me. I would sleep deeply and wouldn’t wake until tomorrow morning, to witness the end. There was a man sitting on a wooden chair outside the shop. He was very far away, but even so he looked perfectly at ease, his arm hooked over the back of the chair with a native indolence dear to my heart.
I was walking down the sidewalk toward the light when I noticed a window set into the high wall on the other side of the street, pure darkness behind its vertical metal bars and unlit white candles melted and fixed in place along the sill. The whole frame was illuminated by the lightless, glowing white of the candle wax. If there was any way out of this hell, then the window was it.
The man sat calmly, waiting, drenched in the strong light spilling from the shop at his back. I looked through the shop window and saw only wooden shelves holding nothing but a few old watches, and no one inside despite the dazzling glare. The moment he saw me, the man gave a smile of joy and waved his arm in greeting, but he didn’t move from his chair. I drew closer, trying to recall if I’d seen him before, but unlike the street he wasn’t familiar at all. Overcome by curiosity, I went up and greeted him.
He said that he had been waiting for me for a long time. Many years had gone by, and he had sat out here each evening at the same time. He knew that I would come one day at precisely this hour. I wasn’t late, he said, glancing at his watch—I had it down to the very minute—and then he told me that he had been given the hour, but not the day. And gently he chided me, but he also said that he had never been bored, that he would have waited many more years and never lost his faith that I would come.
I asked him if he would rather we went inside, but he said it would only take a couple of minutes at most. He wasn’t going to get up. I must finish it all now.
On the sidewalk opposite, I saw the silhouette of a woman carefully setting a lit candle on the windowsill, then grasping o
ne of the thin bars and murmuring to herself, the light unveiling her lined face.
The man never spoke a word to prompt me, but his expression and his smile said as much: an invitation to come closer, and closer still. I drew up to the chair, circled his neck with my hands, and started to squeeze, and before I could increase the pressure he reached out, and gripped my wrist, and croaked something I couldn’t understand. I let him go. He coughed a little and rubbed his neck, then asked if he was supposed to resist, so that the death wouldn’t count as suicide. I had no ready answer to that, but after some hesitation I told him that it would be considered a regular death. He shivered with delight, and smiled once more, and this time he turned his face away, toward the window. And, docile as anything, he laid his hands in his lap. The candle was out and the woman was gone. I clasped his neck again and started to squeeze with all my strength.
10
THERE WEREN’T MANY PEOPLE IN Ataba Square, no more than a hundred perhaps, wearily looking on as several individuals were hanged on the high stage. It was a procedure performed as pure routine: the condemned stood beneath the gallows, then the executioner placed the noose about his neck, took a few steps back, and opened the trap, and the body dropped away, suspended from the rope. A few minutes later, the body was slowly lifted back up, listing a little, but with enough slack in the rope to let the knot be loosened. The executioner approached and removed the head from the noose, the body was gradually lowered into the base of the stage, and the next convict stepped forward to take his place.
I walked down Adly Street. They had impaled a large number of men outside the synagogue and left them there, their blood smearing the stakes. It was a far bloodier spectacle than the hanging, but people were passing by without giving the bodies so much as a second glance. A number of officers sat there, their shoulders beneath the corpses’ feet, fiddling with their phones and reading the papers.
On Talaat Harb Street, two men had been strung up from lampposts. The legs of each man had been roped together, while their bodies dangled free, arms hanging straight down. From the neck of one of them, a sign had been hung. I couldn’t make out the words, so I went right up and peered, and though the letters became crystal clear, I still couldn’t read a thing.
Close by Talaat Harb Square, the soldiers had stacked a great quantity of corpses into a small hill. I walked by the hill with the other people, but only two or three turned to look.
I couldn’t decide: should I enter Tahrir from Qasr al-Nil Street or from Talaat Harb? I didn’t want to go the long way around and enter the square from the far side. As I stood there on the corner of Talaat Harb Street, I could clearly see the great edifice of the Mogamma in Tahrir. I walked down the street, which had started to become crowded. On the corner of Hoda Shaarawi Street stood blue barrels containing severed heads and a great green skip full of headless bodies. There was much blood underfoot, still slippery in some places but mainly dried; when my foot struck the solid, clotted lumps, the crust peeled off to reveal layers of a dark, sticky red. By now my shoes were disgusting, and I paused for a moment to contemplate the fact that I had never before walked in such dirty shoes.
Coming into Tahrir Square, I turned instinctively to look at the Cairo Tower. I pictured a sniper up there, watching the square, watching me, tracking me through his scope as I walked toward its dead center. I grinned and waved, looking toward the balcony where I used to stand. There were a huge number of people in the square, and the sheer scale of the vast stage suggested that many more would be along soon. The stage rose up in the middle of the square, about three meters high and running away either side of a black-clad executioner, who was lifting boxes up from the interior of the stage through a trapdoor I couldn’t see. Then he opened the boxes and took out his tools, which he laid out on a table that stood at center stage, the black of his outfit broken only by three stars gleaming on either shoulder.
I pushed through the standing spectators until the dense crowd around the base of the stage prevented me from going further. There were no women where I stood. Only a few wore masks; the rest had left their faces uncovered.
We were silent, waiting for what would happen. A suffocating reek of sweat rose off the crowd. They looked exhausted and unshaven. Many were barefoot, their clothes ragged and ill fitting. I was a stranger among them.
Teams of cockroaches spread through the crowd, muscles quivering, their chests, and arms, and shoulders tensed. At first, I assumed this was a show of strength, a display, but none of it was intentional. Their youthful bodies surged and bobbed unconsciously, out of control.
A doctor climbed onto the stage, dapper in white coat and spectacles. From his capacious bag, he took flexible tubes, monitors, syringes, and pouches containing a colorless solution. These he laid out on the table alongside the executioner’s tools.
I felt shudders run down my arm and beneath my armpit, and a great weight pressing down on my shoulders. I had difficulty breathing. Then the pain struck my back and my muscles convulsed.
A hatch in the floor of the stage was opened and the executioner brought Farida out from below. I knew her body immediately—I didn’t need to wait for the executioner to lift the black hood from her head.
She was dressed in red, her head held high, and was looking into the executioner’s face, studying him. They had cut her hair, and the neck I adored seemed terribly thin.
The executioner took her by the arm and led her to the front of the stage, facing the crowds, then he made her turn around, showing her off to them, and they went wild: howls, and whistles, and cries, arms raised high in celebration. And all the while the sky pressed down.
The executioner stripped the red dress off her—she had been wearing nothing else—and began gesturing at her breasts. He looked out at the crowds and lifted his hand to his chin in mock wonder. He thrust out his forefinger, alerting them to the missing nipple.
Then he took a scalpel from the table beside him, sliced away her other nipple, and tossed it to the crowd.
The people behind me surged forward, their expressions dazed and lifeless. They wanted to grab the nipple at any cost, but it was lost underfoot. The stink of sweat enveloped us, rank and overwhelming.
The executioner brought her back to center stage, her breast bleeding. He tied her to a stout post that stuck up out of the boards and shackled her neck with an iron ring fixed to the post.
The doctor stuck a needle in her neck, attached it to a pouch of the colorless solution, and hooked up a monitor to her chest. Then he bound her arms together just above the elbows with strips of white cloth.
The executioner was merciful: he decided to cut her hands off in one go, not to snip the fingers off one by one. He cut quickly and without much blood, then threw them to the crowd. Their excitement increased and they swarmed around the hands.
With the same scalpel, he sliced the skin and flesh off her right elbow, then started cutting through the joint with a saw. He threw the arm to the crowd. Then he cut off another piece and threw that, too.
At the executioner’s direction, a second man emerged from inside the stage and stood behind Farida. He grasped her breasts and held her against the wooden post, and now the executioner worked fast. He cut off both her legs at the knees.
I was injured several times—people were squabbling violently over the body parts being tossed down to them. The second executioner released Farida and left her to thrash about, suspended from her neck and trying to get free from the iron ring, and all around me were many people standing stock still, faces raised. They had dropped their trousers and were masturbating.
The two men now settled what was left of Farida into a raised chair. The executioner cut in a circle around the base of each breast, digging deeper and deeper until he’d removed them both. Then he threw them to the crowd. The powerful smell of sperm mixed with that of the sweat, and I could no longer feel the pain or the great weight pressing down. I was free at last.
Men were standing around me, utter
ly naked, with sperm dripping from their cocks. One of them began to club the heads of his neighbors with a short metal pipe that rang with every blow, yet no one paid him or his blows any heed. Even those he was assaulting didn’t move.
Then I heard the sound of gunfire, and many of those standing by the stage fell down. Someone was shooting from beneath the stage to clear space for themselves. A group of masked men dressed in black with bulletproof vests emerged. They waved their guns at the crowd, and three of them brought out a vast, polished mirror. It gleamed in the sun, and at its base I could see huge wheels. They rolled it over the fallen bodies, wobbling and almost falling, until it had passed over all those lying there.
They made a quarter turn in front of the stage, the mirror turning with them, and I could see the buildings and the blue sky behind them reflected in the surface facing me—as though I were looking into another hell.
Then they stopped in front of Farida and the executioner lifted her head to face the mirror. Her eyes locked on it. Farida was still alive, and she smiled.
Then the executioner unclasped the iron ring and, with his colleague’s help, he lifted her up and threw her to the crowd.
Hundreds descended on Farida. I fell down, feet trampling every part of me, and I grabbed at a passing leg and brought down its owner, and many more who were coming after him fell down in turn. And when the crowd’s rush had subsided, I was able, with difficulty, to get to my feet.
I looked for Farida, but she was too important for them to have left her behind. The crowd stampeded to the edge of the square, and I ran with them, and I caught glimpses of Farida’s body being tossed from hand to hand, the crowd tossing it back and forth, soaked in blood. It would be visible for an instant, then vanish for seconds at a time, then appear again, growing bloodier and bloodier every time.
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