The Devil Is a Black Dog

by Sandor Jaszberenyi

  Bravely the dead men ride thro’ the night.

  Is my love afraid of the quiet dead?”

  “Ah! let them alone in their dusty bed!”

  —Gottfried August Bürger, “Lenore”*

  She wrote to say she wasn’t going to let me see the child. I read the email through once more, then thought it would be a good time to put on my jacket and go out into the fighting on the street. It would be better than writing back and spending the rest of the night staring into the monitor, waiting for a response. I wasn’t in the mood to tell her for the thousandth time not to blackmail me with my own child.

  Out on the street they were fighting for peace. Cairo was burning. The demonstrators attacked the Interior Ministry with sticks and stones. The police had begun firing into the crowds. Typically it pleases me when there is fighting, as it gives me work with which to occupy myself.

  I’d seen four wars in the year that passed since she took the child. I had no idea how much morphine I would consume, how many barroom brawls and dogfights I’d see, how many Sudanese whores I would fuck in backstreet brothels before the madness and rage would be driven from me. But what was left was aimlessness; I didn’t know how to move forward. If I didn’t keep myself occupied, I’d just sit there gazing at my navel for days or even weeks. On that night, as on many nights, I preferred to put on my coat, check my camera, and grab a taxi.

  The driver didn’t want to take me to Tahrir Square, so I had to walk across Qasr al-Nil Bridge, where a large crowd had gathered, gaping dumbfounded at the oily black smoke rising from the city center. An armored personnel carrier was in flames by the entrance to the square. Wide red stains darkened the cement, but the bodies were nowhere to be seen. The demonstrators must have taken them to a nearby mosque. I imagined they’d been laid out on the mosque’s synthetic green prayer carpets and wrapped in white blankets, which the blood would slowly seep through. I had seen this before, at the outbreak of the uprising. The bodies began to reek within an hour, and the blood flowed from them as though they were still living.

  The shards of a broken windshield crunched under my shoes as I got closer to the fire. I took a picture of a young hooded man. He was shouting “Murderers, murderers!” at the black-clad riot police, spittle flying from his mouth.

  The crowd that had assembled by the square’s entrance was throwing rocks at the riot police. I snapped five or so pictures before the demonstrators surged. Smoke grenades sliced through the air above, white trails in their wake. The police line broke, and eight men stepped forward and began to fire with shotguns. Those who took the shots in the front line fell. From the rear rows people ran clutching their faces, blood running between their fingers. From twenty meters, a shotgun blast is no longer lethal, but it can still take out an eye. Everybody began to flee. I ran with the crowd all the way to the bridge.

  The escape didn’t last long—just until we were out of the guns’ range. The police closed off their formation, then retreated to the front of Qasr al-Ayni Street. I had accidentally hit somebody with a camera lens during the surge, and was forced to stop and check that the glass hadn’t shifted; only afterward did I start heading back with the demonstrators, who were again throwing stones. I shot a series of two young boys, Molotov cocktails in their hands, charging toward the police.

  Right then I saw Sahra Gamal. She was kneeling at Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a Nikon D5 in her hand. We knew each other—she’d been there during the recent conflicts in Libya and Gaza; she was a brave woman, one of the bravest I’d known. Sahra, who had duel German and Egyptian citizenship, worked for Der Spiegel. She never turned down an assignment, and had seen some of the fiercest action around. So it was no surprise to see her there on one knee, in a scarf, her breasts bound with cloth. For the first time, it struck me what a beautiful woman she was. I went and stood beside her.

  “Let’s get a drink after the next barrage,” I said. Before she could answer, a fresh attack came and the fleeing crowd separated us.

  It had grown dark. The streetlights on Tahrir Square had been turned on. In front of the Mugamma building where volunteer doctors were assembling tents, the wounded lay moaning on the muddy, blood-caked mats; you could see their breath in the air. The cold came suddenly. The sun had almost completely disappeared from the horizon, and the temperature dropped to around five degrees. In many places across the square, fires blazed. On Mohamed Mahmoud Street there was still fighting, and the barricades had been set alight.

  David Sanders, an American photojournalist, called to see where I was, and showed up later amid the fighting. We had worked alongside one another several times in the past. He was with Reuters, so we didn’t step on each other’s toes. It’s good to have somebody around who knows you. In a worst-case scenario he can lie and deliver some wise dying words to your family, or embellish an otherwise pointless death with some heroic details.

  We emerged from Mohamed Mahmoud Street, our faces burning from tear gas and our shoes making a wet, smacking sound against the pavement from the mixture of oil and mud. My leather jacket was speckled with buckshot holes, and Sanders’s old Soviet coat hadn’t fared much better. I took my gas mask from my face, sat on a bench, and lit a cigarette. Sanders—who was tall, black-haired, and Jewish—sat next to me, dropping his 5D in his lap. Dirt outlined the place where his mask had been.

  “It’s getting dark,” he said.

  “Yeah, we’re fucked for more pictures.”

  “Right. How many did you get?”

  He took the cigarette from my hand and had a drag. I looked at the indicator.

  “Three hundred and forty-eight.”

  “I got around that many as well. It’s enough.”

  “My face is burning.”

  “So is mine. Let’s grab a drink.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, I’m not about to cross over to Zamalek. So here at the Lotus.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  I felt dizzy from the gas and my limbs were heavy. Sanders was also out of it; we could barely drag ourselves along. The Lotus stood at the head of Talaat Harb Street. It was one of the few places that held a license to sell alcohol. Nobody ever actually stayed there; the mattresses had bedbugs, the sheets were grimy, and there was never any hot water.

  To get to the bar, you had to ring a bell on the wall, signaling the headwaiter, who would send the elevator down. Even as we ascended we could hear the thrum from the street. As soon as we stepped from the elevator, our faces were hit with cigarette smoke. Every table was crowded with journalists; practically the entire international media was there. Alcohol hinders the absorption of tear gas into the bloodstream, and it eases the poison’s effects. Everybody there was guzzling drink after drink.

  I peeled myself from my equipment and sat at the bar.

  “What will the gentlemen be having?” the headwaiter asked.

  “Itnēn Auld Stag, min fadlik.”

  He nodded, grabbed two dusty water glasses from the shelf, rinsed them out, then took some ice from a bucket.

  “Single or double?” he asked, bottle in hand.

  “Double,” we said simultaneously.

  He poured and we each downed ours in a gulp.

  “Another?”

  I nodded yes. I was drinking on an empty stomach; I could feel the alcohol run up my spine.

  “What’s the score?” asked Sanders and staggered over to the TV, which was showing Mohamed Mahmoud Street. In the dark only the flaming barricades and the flashes from the police rifles could be seen. Al Jazeera was broadcasting live from one of the apartments on the square.

  “Thirteen dead, more than three hundred wounded,” said the headwaiter, placing the next round in front of us. “Though the Ministry of Health hasn’t confirmed that yet.”

  “Well, at least it wasn’t us,” said Sanders.

  We drank to the fact that we had gotten through the day alive, that we were OK. We were still alive to file one more story, to spend another day in a foreign coun
try with foreign inhabitants, in the middle of a foreign conflict.

  “I’m going to wash my face,” I said and headed toward the restroom on the floor below; a grimy rug covered the steps that led there. Halfway down I came face to face with Sahra Gamal. She had already taken off her scarf, her black hair falling to her shoulders. Her face was damp with water.

  “Now, can I invite you for a drink?” I said.

  “I’d rather just go to my place.”

  She took my hand, climbed to one step above me, and kissed my lips. I could smell the tear gas on her skin. We went back to the bar together to get my stuff. Sanders was already stupidly drunk. He looked at me and in a gurgling voice said, “Watch out. That one’s crazy.”

  Sahra lived in a three-room apartment in Heliopolis. “Do it so it hurts,” she said as we undressed. We didn’t shower; we simply stripped ourselves of our clothing and fell all over each other on her Ikea bed. Her eyes flashed when I wrapped my hands around her neck. I pinned her down on the bed and entered her.

  Afterward we lay wordlessly next to each other.

  I was staring at a picture on the wall, a 2009 World Press Photo winner, showing a Palestinian woman carrying the body of a dead child. The shot was taken with a 55 mm lens, the photographer standing opposite her.

  “Did you take that?” I asked, indicating the picture. Her neck was still red from my grasp.

  “Yes,” she said and took hold of my outstretched hand. She was staring at the ring on my finger.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why the ring? You don’t have to lie.”

  “It’s not a lie. I’m not married.”

  “Then why the ring?”

  “It’s stuck to my finger. I can’t take it off anymore. I was married, though.”

  “What happened?”

  “She thought I was getting in the way of her career as a writer.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last year. And she took our child.”

  “And? Did you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you to wear the ring, then?”

  “It does; I just can’t take it off.”

  She looked at the ring on my finger for a while, then said, “Why don’t you cut it off?”

  “Because I like my finger.”

  We fell silent again. I wasn’t in the mood to tell her that the mother of my child had slept with my enemies at every opportunity, that she seemed to take great joy in my destruction. I didn’t want to tell her how my heart had stopped in Arish from all the tranquilizers I’d taken, or how once I hadn’t slept for a week, 165 hours, to be exact. I didn’t want her to know that my ex was blackmailing me with parental visitations, and how, in the end, you could do anything to another person with no consequences. It had nothing to do with her.

  “And, you, what’s your story?” I asked. It occurred to me that anybody over the age of thirty must have one. “Just screwing around?”

  “Mine died in Iraq.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. He went and got himself shot.”

  “Was he in the press?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “I was pregnant when he died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You needn’t be. I got rid of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t deliver babies to dead people.”

  She got up and went to the bathroom. I could hear her turn on the shower. I looked at my watch; it was 1 AM. I rose from the bed and began to dress.

  I found her in the hall, wrapped in a white towel.

  “If you want to sleep here, I can make up the couch.”

  “Just a blanket is fine. Thanks.”

  She stepped over to a closet, took out a light blue blanket, and put it into my hands.

  “Lock the door on your way out when you leave.”

  In the shower, I used her lavender body gel, and then went to bed. I couldn’t sleep, however. I kept looking at the photos on the wall in the dim light of the room. They were all hers, and they all took place in the heat of battle. She had been to every one of those places in the last seven years, and in each place she had been on the front line of an armed conflict. It suddenly came to me that, if indications were true, other people also had shitty lives.

  I checked my phone. My editor needed the pictures from the night before. I sent him an email and headed out.

  Glass from the smashed storefront windows crunched under my feet along Talat Harb Street. I felt queasy. I thought I might walk down Mohamed Mahmoud Street, snap a few shots of the burning barricades, and then, while I was there, go have a drink. Sanders was already in Alexandria shooting the ruckus there, so I was quite alone.

  A huge crowd had already gathered on Tahrir Square. A bearded man in a robe stood at the square’s opening, toweling off his face.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “We are keeping them busy so they can’t enter the square.”

  “How many are injured?”

  “I don’t know, but the dead are in the Omar Makram Mosque. They are there, and there are more than a few.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Allah Karim.”

  The air was thick with tear gas and the smoke from burning trash. I took my camera from its case, set it to the night photography mode, and headed down Mohamed Mahmoud Street. The Central Security Forces had cut the power to the entire district. On both sides of the street the trash bins and barricades were ablaze; the demonstrators had lit them to keep the tear gas attacks at bay and to see movement in the night.

  An ambulance tried to cut through the heaving crowd, but the sirens couldn’t be heard above the sounds of shotguns and fighting.

  On the nearby streets the fighting continued. I saw lit Molotov cocktails in the hands of the surging crowd, but there wasn’t enough light to get photos of them. A tear gas grenade cut through the air, emitting a thick white wake of smoke, and landed a few yards from where I was standing. I put my gas mask on. It wasn’t the best equipment; I had bought it for twenty-five dollars from a street vendor. It was meant for industrial use, not for a tear gas attack. Still, it worked.

  A second grenade hit the ground, bounced along the cement, and began to smoke. Another followed, then a fourth. A panicked escape ensued. I clutched my camera and began to shoot, flattening myself against the wall so I wouldn’t get carried along with the crowd.

  I didn’t hear the bang of the rifle, didn’t see the barrel flash; I just felt the blow. My head hit the cement. The gas mask was knocked off, and my lungs filled. I was suddenly overcome with calm, the likes of which I hadn’t felt since my divorce. As the world around me went dark, the thought entered my mind that everything had come to an end. It had come to an end on a moonless Middle Eastern night, doing away with those questions of who I was and what I was doing here; doing away with the senseless quest for money, and that money’s even more senseless spending.

  I have no idea how long I was out. When I came to, I felt hands upon me.

  “He is wearing a vest,” said somebody in Arabic.

  I opened my eyes. Sahra Gamal was standing over me with two of the demonstrators.

  “You OK?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. It hurt to speak.

  “You were shot. Lucky thing you had a vest on.”

  “Yes,” I said, and sat up. My side hurt terribly, and blood was dripping from my forehead into my eye.

  “Is there somebody we should contact?”

  “No, nobody.”

  “Your paper?”

  “I’m freelance.”

  “Can you stand?”

  “I think so.”

  I used Sahra to hold me up as I hobbled all the way to Qasr al-Nil Bridge. From there we got a taxi.

  “Here, take this,” she said once we were in the apartment.

  “What is it?”

&nb
sp; “A painkiller.”

  I swallowed the pill. We were standing in the bedroom again. Sahra unbuttoned my shirt, put her hand against my black Kevlar vest, and then ran her fingers all along my side.

  “They shot you here.”

  “Yes.”

  Her hand found the Velcro, then ripped it loose and took the vest off me. The whole spectrum of the rainbow could be seen on my side.

  “Does it hurt when you inhale?”

  “Yes.”

  “You probably broke a rib. Lean back.”

  I leaned back. She took off my boots, my socks, then unbuttoned my belt and pulled my pants off. After she finished, she also began to undress, and then reclined next to me on the bed. Now, for the first time, I took in her entire body. I’d been with lots of women since my divorce, but I never examined the whole of their naked bodies. I simply wasn’t interested. I only wanted them to satisfy my needs, nothing more. I wouldn’t have used them if I had come to know their bodies’ flaws. A flaw personalized them.

  Sahra’s body was marred by scar tissue and cuts, but it was still beautiful. I gazed at her brown skin for a while, the little black nipples. On the inner part of her right hand was tattooed in black letters, Die Toten Reiten Schnell. It was a new tattoo; it couldn’t have been more than a year old, as there was no fading.

  “What does it mean?” I asked, running a finger over it.

  “To ride fast like the dead. It’s German.”

  “I understand that, but why did you have it inked there?”

  “To remind myself.”

  “Of what?”

  “That the dead don’t hold back anything, because the worst has already happened to them. Their lives were taken.”

  “And you think you are dead?”

  “I don’t think I lived past what happened to me. I have no life outside my work, no purpose, no desire. I am like the dead. With just a memory of who I was.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “No, it’s not. I know you know what I’m talking about. You also died; I saw it in your eyes.”

  “We’ve both done some pretty lively things. Together, for example.”

  “It’s a way to pass the time.”

  “You want to die?”