The Devil Is a Black Dog

by Sandor Jaszberenyi

  “It’s freedom,” the man said with a smile. He was used to the police taking foreigners from his car.

  “Let’s not celebrate just yet.”

  We continued on, taking the long way around Tahrir Square, which was closed off by the military. At Saad Zaghloul Square I decided to get out and walk a bit. There were hardly any people on the streets. Shards of broken glass grated under my sandals, and smoke still rose from the smoldering trash cans that had been used as barricades. It felt good to walk in the city center, with nobody out to kill me. I had covered the whole revolution. After a few days I got used to the tear gas, but not the explosions from the Molotov cocktails or the sound of machine-gun fire. On the other hand, I had become accustomed to living without my usual comforts. Alcohol was the first to go, then I quit smoking, and then as the situation got worse, hot showers, and finally bedding. It’s entirely possible to sleep well on potato sacks, among rats, if you happen to find yourself in a produce market, hiding from a bloodthirsty mob that wants your neck.

  Biled, the alcoholic Coptic headwaiter, was standing outside the Horreya, smoking. I took a long drag from my own cigarette, ground the butt into the side of my sandal, then kicked it into the street.

  “I thought they would have arrested you by now,” he said with a smile once he noticed me.

  “They did. Three times.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “They let me go.”

  “Well, that’s a different story. Go on, take a seat in the back.”

  We shook hands, and I made my way to the rear of the café, which was cordoned off. Biled didn’t like the beer drinkers to sit by the window, lest it provoke the devout Muslims outside. He sent everybody to the back if the place wasn’t full, or if he had yet to drink enough not to care. I sat down. Without asking, he put an Egyptian Stella in front of me. The beer was cold, the foam bubbling over the rim and flowing down the bottle in a thin stream, wetting my fingers. I lifted it to my lips and took a long swig. I savored the sensation of the bubbly liquid flooding the back of my mouth until the smell of malt rose into my nose. I felt like a new man.

  After I finished the beer, I looked around the café, hoping to spot somebody I knew. It is not good to drink alone. I didn’t count on finding a foreigner; most had left the country at the first sign of trouble, and the Western journalists would all be drinking at flashy places like the Hilton Ramses or the Estoril, where it’s possible to buy foreign-made beer. A few of the usual gay boys sat at the tables draped with fly-shit covered plastic tablecloths, and a group of shorthaired Sudanese hookers were trawling for customers. I called over to Biled to bring me another beer. Somebody at the bar had left behind the day’s issue of Al-Ahram. The front page lauded the victims of the revolution. The martyrs’ faces were emblazoned in miniature hand-drawn portraits. The headline printed in red announced, “840 DEAD IN THREE WEEKS.” Underneath it the subheading read, “THE NUMBER OF WOUNDED STANDS ABOVE 6,000.”

  I looked up when a new customer entered and watched a man of around sixty sit down at a table near me. He was dressed in a white jellabiya and a white traditional hat, and he wore a beard that was cut and dyed according to the Sunnah dictates. His forehead was darkened by the callus that adorned the devout, who prayed with their heads to the rug five times a day.

  “What can I bring you, Doctor?” asked Biled.

  “A Stella.”

  The headwaiter placed a beer in front of the man, who immediately slugged it down.

  “Another.”

  “As you wish, Doctor.”

  I sat by, astounded. You rarely meet an alcoholic Islamist in Cairo. Biled picked up on my surprise, stepped over to my table, and intoned quietly in my ear, “Don’t bother Ahmed Salem. I’ll explain the whole thing later.”

  I returned to my beer and continued to look over the paper. The Islamist stared ahead of himself and drank mechanically. In under half an hour, seven empty bottles of Stella sat before him. My head awash in beer, I lost myself again in the paper. It was highly entertaining to read about how the military and the people were friends, and of the impending democratic reforms, and the celebration of “our new heroes.” I then noticed that somebody was standing next to my table. It was one of the Sudanese prostitutes. She wore a flower-patterned dress, and stood with her hands on her hips, flashing a perfect row-full of white teeth.

  “I know what you’re here for,” she said, and licked her lips. “Buy me a beer?”

  I put on my glasses to better take her in. Her nipples poked out through her dress, as she had probably pinched them into shape before coming over. She had a beautiful body, young and strong. An image of her naked flesh flashed through my mind: her brown breasts, her totally black nipples. I hadn’t been with a woman in a month, yet still I shook my head no. I had spent too much money already in recent weeks to be able to afford the company. Her smile melted away and she clicked her tongue at me scornfully before heading off to the washroom. The Islamist had just finished his ninth beer. When the woman passed his table, he reached out his hand to stop her. He whispered something I couldn’t hear, then the man stood up and reached into the pocket of his jellabiya, pulled out a 100-pound note, and dropped it on the table. The girl and the older man staggered arm in arm toward the exit. They made a striking, inexplicable pair.

  “Good-bye, Doctor,” called Biled before they disappeared into the night. I looked after their shapes as they faded away down the block.

  It was approaching curfew, and most of the customers had already left. Only us two were left as the fridge rumbled and the ceiling fans churned about the night air. With one of his filthy rags, Biled swatted a fly, then grabbed a glass, sat next to me, and helped himself to my beer.

  “The revolution has brought out something different in everybody,” he said. “The man you just saw, well, he abandoned God.” Biled’s face reflected neither sadness nor triumph: he was simply establishing the facts. The beer washed the dirt from the edge of his glass as he tipped it back.

  “Is he a friend of yours?” I asked.

  “He is called Ahmed Salem.”

  “Is he in the Muslim Brotherhood?”

  “No, he had nothing to do with politics.”

  “He wore the traditional dress of those in the Brotherhood.”

  “I don’t think he had time to change. It is also possible he doesn’t have any other clothing.”

  He took a cigarette from my pack, put it in his mouth, and looked for a lighter in his pocket. When he didn’t find one, he took my butane lighter from the table and lit up.

  “How well do you know him?” I asked, also taking a cigarette.

  “He is my neighbor on Qasr al-Ayni Street. He’s a doctor. I used to go to him for this and that.”

  “How do you know he gave up God?”

  “Invite me for a beer and I will tell you.”

  Biled had a terrible habit of mooching from customers’ drinks, smoking their cigarettes, or simply inviting himself to sit down. His position as headwaiter, however, could mean life or death to a guy like me, so it wasn’t wise to point fingers. I nodded. He stood, went to retrieve two beers from the fridge, returned, and placed the drinks on the table.

  “Here’s how it is. Salem was a good Muslim, and deeply religious. He had an unshakable belief that God was everywhere, and he totally submitted himself to his religion.”

  “I always envy optimists,” I said dryly.

  “Me too.” Biled took a long swig from his drink. “In any case, he kept his faith even when there was reason to doubt. For instance, it seemed he couldn’t advance any higher in his profession, because the head of the hospital was desperately afraid that he was of the Brotherhood. His wife died in childbirth, and he brought up his only daughter alone. Still, he always kept a positive outlook. He knew every beggar by name, and never accepted money from the poor. Yes, there are people like this. They are rare, but they exist.”

  “And?”

  “When the military
began to use live rounds, he thought he would uphold his doctors’ oath. At the hospital they were arresting the injured demonstrators.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “It happened. The Mukhabarat pulled demonstrators straight from the operating table.”

  “What does this have to do with him giving up God?”

  “When it dawned on Salem that the demonstrators would rather die on the street than come to the hospital, he and a few other doctors and nurses set up a triage in the Abu Bakr worship room.”

  “That’s the one on the corner. I was there to take pictures. They operated on the prayer rugs.”

  “They slept on them as well.”

  Biled stood, closed the café door, then began to put the chairs up on the table. The sound of the chairs smacking against the plastic tablecloths roused the bugs that congregated around the table legs.

  “They saw six hundred people a day.”

  “How do you know?”

  He turned toward me and raised his pant leg. His ankle was swollen and purple. A long black incision ran all the way up to his knee.

  “It didn’t break, but I couldn’t stand on it. It looked uglier than it was, so they placed me next to the burned and broken. The doctors were at it twenty-one hours a day then. Salem worked his fingers to the bone, stopping only to pray. The corpses were piled in the corner next to where they prayed, yet still they prayed.”

  “He must have been one of the truly religious ones.”

  “Indeed, but the patients were terrified of him.”

  “Because he prayed next to the corpses?”

  “No, for another reason. As a surgeon, he only took the most serious cases. There was no medicine, no instruments. It was like out of the Middle Ages, the way they had to work. Sixty or so people died in his hands. It appeared to them that every person who he worked on died.”

  “And that’s why he drinks?”

  “That and more. The wounded cried for him to keep away. Some suffered from hallucinations, and they begged God not to let the Angel of Death touch them. I think it hurt him, because things like this can hurt a man. But it wasn’t because of this that he abandoned God.”

  “Then why?”

  “On the revolution’s fourth day, the police shot into the crowd in Talaat Harb. The demonstrators brought in their wounded on blankets. By then, the work was routine for Salem. He laid the patients in an orderly line and worked on only those he thought he could save. But on that day, one of them, it turns out, was his own daughter.”

  “She was demonstrating on Tahrir?”

  “Of course not. She was on her way home when she was hit by a stray bullet. She got it in the lung, and was already fading when they brought her in. Her father plugged the wound with his finger to stop the blood loss, and began to operate. All the while, everybody heard him speaking to God, how he said, ‘Just this one, don’t take this one. I was pure, I kept every rule; I never asked for anything. Just do this, I beg of you.’ ”

  “And what happened?” I stood up to bring two more beers from the fridge. Biled lit another cigarette, sat down, and leaned back in his chair.

  “He couldn’t save his daughter. It was all over in half an hour.”

  “And that’s why he drinks. He fell out with God.”

  I put the bottles on the table, and marked them on my bill.

  “Or he discovered that no God exists,” said Biled. He blew out some smoke and opened our beers. Ten more bottles would join our stream of drink that night.

  The Devil Is a Black Dog

  The moon rose high above the town, illuminating the clouds, the apartment buildings, and the hills beyond in a red glow. The air was cool, like it was every evening in the hills. There was no electricity in the town, just the blood-colored moonlight that gathered at end of the alleyways.

  “It’s like this from the storm,” said Abdelkarim, when he noticed my expression of awe. “There was a storm in the desert, and the moon looks red from the dust.”

  He took a long drag from his cigarette. We had been coming out onto the roof most evenings since I’d moved into the mosque. It was good to sit in the night air, smoke hash, and talk about this and that. The government army had ended its shelling a few days ago. It was quiet now. Just the moon shone on the town, lighting up the destruction.

  “Tomorrow the weather will be good,” said the imam.

  “How do you know?”

  “My wife heard it on the radio.”

  I smiled and reached for the cigarette. Abdelkarim was in his early forties, but his beard was already gray. I had been staying with him for two weeks, since the day the Hotel Mecca was hit. The government had shelled the town indiscriminately, blowing the hotel to bits. When I’d come down from the hills, where I’d been staying with the Houthis, I found the building in ruins. The wretched hotelier, whom I managed to track down nonetheless, informed me that he couldn’t return my two hundred dollars, because he needed it to feed his family. With no better idea, I knocked at the mosque where Abdelkarim was the imam. A big-hearted, generous man, he offered me a room. We immediately took to each other.

  “What do you think? When will the foreigners return?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Another week, maybe.”

  In truth, I had no idea.

  The mujahideen controlled the roads, and kidnappings were common. My safest route back to the capital would have been to go with the armed convoys of the humanitarian organizations, but the soldiers had already evacuated everybody. I’d stayed behind, alone.

  “There were many dead,” said Abdelkarim. It was also his job to organize provisions for the wounded. He wasn’t a doctor, but he could take their pain away; the town was awash with soggy, raw opium, brought from Afghanistan by returning mujahideen. The opium relieved the pain and induced good dreams. The mortally wounded could sleep until their hearts gave out. This was a merciful death for those who had been torn to shreds by gunfire, burned beyond recognition, or had taken a bullet to the stomach.

  The wind caught Abdelkarim’s robe as he stood up and reached out for the banister.

  “Tomorrow the weather will be good,” he said.

  “Let’s hope so,” I said.

  “I should take the girls out to kick a ball around. War shouldn’t be their only memory of their childhood.”

  “Yes, that will make them happy.”

  He had two girls, one three years old, the other five. I frequently ran into them around the house. Abdelkarim allowed me to listen in as he read to them from the Koran and then explained the meaning of the passages. It was the wife whom I wasn’t allowed to meet. That my meals were prepared and my clothing washed was the only indication that she lived in the house. Abdelkarim begged my forgiveness that he could not introduce me to her. A woman was not allowed to be in a room with a man who was not her husband or relative. Because of this, it was the custom in Yemen for new mothers to nurse their male infants together. They would sit in a circle and pass the baby from one to the next, allowing it to feed from each of their bodies, so they could all claim him as a relative.

  “Let’s go to sleep, friend. Perhaps tomorrow we can get a hold of a Saudi television channel and watch the soccer match.”

  “Inshallah.”

  “I’ll fix the antenna.”

  I tipped back the remainder of the karkadé that we were drinking. Bitter and cold, it stung the roof of my mouth. I took the pitcher in my hand and carefully, so as not to slip on the adobe stairs, started down. Abdelkarim followed, holding a gas lamp. Our shadows fluttered against the wall in front of us.

  We arrived at the room where I slept, the floor covered in prayer rugs and horse blankets. There was no window, so there was no breeze, like there was on the top floor. By dawn, though, the room would be cold enough to see my own breath.

  “Good night, friend,” said Abdelkarim. “I will wake you in the morning.” He shook my hand, then turned and began toward the floor below, where he lived with his wife. It was at th
is time that we heard a clamor coming from outside. Somebody was pounding against the mosque’s green iron gate. We both rushed to the building’s entrance.

  Abdelkarim threw open the iron bolt and opened the gate wide. On the street stood a ten-year-old boy, barefoot and dressed in grimy clothing. From his belt hung an old Luger. His upper lip was quivering. He tapped his foot nervously. His eyes twitched.

  “Thank you for opening the gate,” he said.

  “What brings you here, Abdul Muhyi?” asked my host. “And where is your clan?”

  “The devil has come to the hills,” said the boy.

  That was the first time I heard about the black dog.

  Abdelkarim lit a gas lantern on the wall of the prayer room, the light revealing a green prayer carpet. Abdul Muhyi sat against the wall and gulped water from a goatskin sack. The liquid dribbled down his chin and gathered in dark stains on his robe. He drank deep and long as we waited for him to continue his story.

  “I was putting the goats out to graze by the cave tomb as usual,” said the boy once he was ready. “I heard movement coming from inside. I thought somebody from the town had come to dig up a body, so I went in. The cave was dark, and at first I couldn’t see a thing.…” His voice became clenched and he began to shiver.

  “And what did you see, Abdul Muhyi?” asked my host.

  “Bismillah, the devil! The devil was in the tomb in the form of a dog. He was eating human flesh and drinking blood.” As he told the story, the boy’s face strained with fear, and he paused repeatedly to recite the Shahada.

  “And why do you think it was the devil and not just some stray dog? You know they have been hunting in packs up in the hills since the war broke out.”

  “His eyes glowed red.”

  “That’s just how they look in the dark. I wonder why you didn’t try to chase it away.”

  “But I did. I took my gun from my pocket and shot at him. I emptied the entire magazine at that demon, but he didn’t move a muscle.”

  “And then?”