The Republic of False Truths

by Alaa Al Aswany

  Suddenly the general grew furious and shouted, “So it’s come to this? You’re giving me lessons now? It’s not your fault, it’s my fault for having listened to your mother and, instead of sending you to Cambridge, putting you into Cairo University with the children of the rabble, who have poisoned your mind. I will not permit you to speak to me with such impertinence! Do you understand?”

  “I’m sorry,” Danya said, in a low voice, but General Alwany had decided to push on to the end. He took a flash drive from his pocket, put it into his laptop, and pressed some keys. Danya quickly appeared on the screen, sitting with some young people who were talking to an elderly lady dressed in black. “What’s this?” he asked her.

  Danya appeared embarrassed for a moment but then said, “That was a visit I made with my fellow students to the mother of the martyr Khaled Said.”

  “So people who die from drugs are martyrs?”

  “The late lamented Khaled Said died of torture.”

  “Even if he did die of torture, what’s it got to do with you?”

  “We’re demanding a fair trial for Khaled Said’s killers.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me and my fellow students at the faculty.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you a lawyer or a medical student?”

  “I’m a Muslim.”

  “We’re all Muslims.”

  “Islam commands me to defend what is right.”

  “Islam says, ‘Sowing discord is worse than murder.’ ”

  “Islam honours the individual and forbids treating him without respect or torturing him.”

  “That’s the talk of the human rights NGOs, the ones that take money from the European Union. Who told you that Islam forbids torture? Aren’t flogging, stoning, and amputation of the hand torture? Islam permits the torture of certain individuals, or even their killing, to keep the country stable. Did you ever hear of a punishment called ‘castigation’? Under castigation the ruler, on his own, has the right to evaluate a crime, decide its punishment, and carry it out against the accused. That means that if the ruler considers any person a threat to the stability of society, he has the right to punish him by flogging and imprisonment, or even, according to some legal scholars, death. Study your religion before you talk to me about it.”

  She hung her head, and he felt a sudden pity for her. “Think again, Danya!” he said. “You’re being pushed into doing things without considering the consequences.”

  As though trying to placate him, she said, “I visited a woman whose son had died of torture. It was just a humane act.”

  “No!” General Alwany responded excitedly. “It was a political act. The state has been accused of murdering Khaled Said. It follows that for you to show solidarity with his mother was an act directed against the state.”

  She didn’t answer, so he went on in a quieter voice, “I’m sure that your intentions are good, but you have to consider the significance of your behaviour. First, by virtue of my position within the state, I can assure you that there is a general conspiracy against Egypt. And your colleagues who are inciting people against the police are, intentionally or not, helping the conspiracy to succeed. Second, you aren’t the same as your colleagues, Danya. In the end, they’re just students, nobodies. Your situation is different. All of Egypt knows you’re my daughter. Have you any idea how many government departments monitor your Facebook page? Have you any idea how many departments filmed you at Khaled Said’s house? Don’t you have any idea that I have opponents and enemies whose goal is to spoil my image with the political leadership? This behaviour of yours is a gift to my enemies. Did it never occur to you that you have a brother who’s a judge and another who’s an officer in the Republican Guard and that their promotions may be delayed and that they could even be dismissed from their posts once and for all because of you?”

  She looked stricken, so he hugged her, kissed her head, and whispered, “Danya, if you love me, promise me it won’t happen again.”

  5

  Ashraf Wissa felt so good as he crossed the hall that he quietly sang to himself, like a bird circling in a clear blue sky. He gazed at the carpet, then at the high ceiling, the lamps, and the pictures hanging on the walls. Everything around him appeared to be full of joy, as though congratulating him on the happiness that was soon to follow. He reached the kitchen, poked his head around the door, and beheld Ikram standing at the sink, washing the cups and plates. At that moment, in her work clothes—a loose garment that covered her head and chest; an old, faded housedress, worn through at the elbows; cloth shoes without socks—she looked like an ordinary maid. She pretended not to have noticed his presence and went on washing the dishes in the hot water. The motion of her hand as she rubbed at the plate seemed to him somehow sexy and, carried away by hashish and arousal, he leapt towards her with a large, celebratory step, as though announcing that the play-acting was over. He clung to her and grasped her breasts, and she let out a gasp and whispered, “No, please, Ashraf Bey. If Madame Magda comes back all of a sudden, it’ll be a disaster!”

  Ashraf paid no attention to this feeble objection (of the sort the law would refer to as “procedural”), held her even tighter, and began slowly and ardently kissing her neck and ears, causing her to produce a low, heated moan. She turned around, gave him a sweet smile (as though the objection of the moment before had never occurred) and whispered, “Okay. You go ahead to the office.”

  She dried her hands and left the kitchen. Immediately, Ashraf set about preparing the theatre of operations. He locked the door to the flat from the inside, turned on the television (to cover the sound of lovemaking so that no nosy parker who happened past the flat would hear anything), and entered his spacious office, where he firmly closed the curtains, took the seat cushions off the chairs, arranged them on the floor, and covered them with two large towels, thereby laying the foundation for the bed of love. Then he lit a joint and smoked it slowly till Ikram appeared at the door. Radiant, she appeared before him in a black, form-fitting nightdress that showed off the curves of her body and opened at her breasts, revealing the shining white beneath. She had applied light make-up to her face and let her smooth black hair hang loosely over her shoulders. How Ikram could be transformed from maid into bewitching mistress so quickly was beyond Ashraf’s comprehension. Where did she hide her make-up things, and the nightdress? When did she find the time to take care of her body and make it so smooth? How did she manage, following the lovemaking, to hide her charms once more under her work clothes?

  Like a seasoned violinist tweaking the instrument’s strings before beginning to play, Ashraf placed light kisses in quick succession on her cheeks, ears, and nose, then devoured her lips in a fiery kiss while his hands roamed slowly over her body. He knew, from long experience, how to pace the waves of desire so that they didn’t cast him onto the shores of pleasure too soon. Despite his numerous experiences, he had never seen a maid who was so clean. Even her underwear was the best that Egyptian industry could provide. All the same, her greatest charm, in his opinion, lay in the fact that she was brut (a French word meaning raw, or unpolished). With her, he felt as though he had returned to nature—to the jungle or the desert: just a man having sex with a woman to satisfy their lusts, without pretence or lies. She expressed what she wanted with total frankness, asking for certain positions and whispering the names of the genitals without embarrassment. Her shameless behaviour ignited and renewed his lust.

  Having come to the end of the first bout of love, they lay on their backs, naked. After he had climaxed and the heavy silence fell, Ashraf would discover his true feelings towards a woman. On such occasions, the naked body that had fascinated him moments before would normally be transformed into a flabby lump, sweaty and abhorrent. With Ikram it was different. The pleasure would come to an end, leaving behind a calm appreciation, a certain astonishment, and feelings of something like gratitude. He
would gaze at her face, flushed with the aftermath of love. He enjoyed holding her close, feeling her warm breaths on his chest, and would bury his nose in her hair so he could inhale the smell of soap. This close, sweet-smelling, warm body seemed to him familiar, as though he had kept it company in a former life, then lost it and by an amazing accident found it again. She wasn’t just a maid with whom he had sex. Their life was in some way conjugal. His wife Magda, always busy with the budgets of big companies, left in the morning and didn’t get back before seven at night. It was Ikram who looked after him, washing his clothes, supervising their ironing, and cooking his favourite dishes. She reminded him about his blood pressure medicine if he forgot to take it, bought razor blades before they ran out, and alerted him that he needed to buy heavy clothes before winter came. They spent the day together, talking, eating, and making love, and then, at the end of the day, carefully removed all traces of the crime. Ikram resumed the appearance of a maid and Ashraf sat and watched television in the living room, so that everything looked normal when his wife returned. He liked Ikram’s personality. It was true that she read and wrote only with difficulty and spoke with a plebeian accent, overemphasising the letters and pronouncing some words wrongly, such as saying “exways” for “X-rays” and “Mershedes” for “Mercedes,” yet, despite all this, she was an intellectually and emotionally intelligent and sensitive person who immediately grasped the subtlest ideas. She was also endowed with true self-respect and absolutely never asked him for money. It was he who pressed her to accept his gifts. She never exploited their relationship so as to remove the social distance between them, as other maids did. When he had asked her to call him by his unadorned name, she had done so once, then laughed in embarrassment and said, “I can’t. Your name, sir, is Ashraf Bey.”

  “Call me just Ashraf!”

  “If you like, but give me a while. It’ll take time.”

  This simple, uneducated maid comported herself with greater refinement than many upper-class ladies whom he knew. She was dazzled by him. She believed that he knew everything. She’d ask him about any subject and her black eyes would grow large as she listened to him with full attention, like a young schoolchild listening to the teacher explaining. Within a few months his relationship with Ikram was better than his relationship with his wife was after a quarter of a century. Ikram understood him with a single look. She was sensitive to his moods and knew if he was hungry or feeling like sex or downhearted or unwell from smoking too much hashish. Once, after a wonderful bout of lovemaking, she put her head on his chest and whispered, “Can I ask you a question, sir, but you mustn’t get angry?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Don’t you love Madame Magda, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “We have different personalities.”

  She looked at him in silence and he laughed and said, “Of course, you want to ask me why I go on living with a woman I don’t love, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m a Copt, Ikram, and we don’t have divorce. If I were a Muslim, I’d divorce Magda and marry you.”

  She smiled and asked him coquettishly, “Go on with you! You’re telling me you’d be willing to marry a maid?”

  He hugged her, planted a quick kiss on her lips, and whispered, “Please don’t say that. You’re better than many women who make themselves out to be great ladies.”

  She hugged him hard, as though to express her gratitude.

  He’d never forget the first time he played one of the films in which he’d acted in her presence. She was sitting next to him on the couch and suddenly yelled out, “O my God! You act in films, sir?”

  He laughed at her childish astonishment and told her he was an actor. After that, he started showing her the scenes in which he appeared and each time she’d show how much she liked his role, which never exceeded a few minutes. Once she asked him, “You act so beautifully, sir. Why don’t you do leading roles and become famous?”

  He thought for a little and then said, “And you, Ikram, are pretty and young and clever. Why don’t you marry a respectable man who knows your worth, instead of all this drudgery you have to put up with?”

  Sadly, she answered, “It’s my fate.”

  Ashraf smiled and said, “And that’s my fate too.”

  Later, he explained to her the corrupt system that operates in the cinema world and he could see in her eyes that she understood him. She grasped that his failure wasn’t his fault—if he lived in a decent country, he’d have become famous long ago. Once he waited a whole day where they were filming in order to shoot a scene that lasted two minutes. The next day, they made love as usual and afterwards he stretched out next to her and told her what had happened. Then he said bitterly, “I’m tired and fed up, Ikram. If I didn’t love Egypt, I wouldn’t stay here another day.”

  She kissed his brow, then placed his head on her bosom and whispered as though rocking him to sleep, “Please, don’t upset yourself, Ashraf Bey. You live well, you’re well off, your health’s fine, and you have Sarah and Butrus, God protect them. Praise God, we’re better off than most, by a long way.”

  At the beginning of their relationship, he’d questioned her about her life, and she’d avoided answering, but he’d pressed her until she did. She’d been born in Hawamdiya, the eldest daughter of a poor family, and she’d lived there with her father, mother, and five brothers and sisters, all crammed into a flat consisting of two bedrooms and a living room; her father had taken her out of school before she obtained her primary certificate and forced her to work as a servant in people’s houses; when she reached sixteen, he’d forced her into a common-law marriage with a sheikh from the Gulf, and earned a few thousand pounds; the husband had vanished at the end of the summer, leaving divorce papers, as it emerged, at a lawyer’s office; the following year, her father had married her off again, for a smaller sum; the pattern had been repeated, with her husband divorcing her after one month and paying the balance of the bride price; when her father had wanted to marry her off a third time, she’d run away and gone to live with a girlfriend and begun working in houses on a day-by-day basis until she’d married Mansour, who made his living ironing clothes, to whom she bore her daughter Shahd, only to discover that he was a serial bigamist, with children from three earlier marriages that he hadn’t told her about; he also worked no more than was needed to earn him the price of the pills and injections of Max to which he was addicted.

  Silence hung over them for a few minutes. Then Ikram sighed and said, “There are women criminals whose luck is good and good women whom God created with bad luck, like me.”

  Ashraf said, “Your father wronged you.”

  She looked at him reproachfully and said, “We have to make allowances.”

  He responded vehemently, “He doesn’t deserve allowances. No one sells their daughter.”

  She was silent for a moment, then said, “No one wants to sell their daughter. My father worked putting up reinforced concrete shuttering. Hand to mouth. One day of work and ten at home. And there were six of us kids, plus my mother. Where was he supposed to find the money to spend on us? Poverty is ugly, Ashraf Bey.”

  Even her sorrow added to her attractiveness. The day before they had made love wonderfully. They’d soared high and reached climax together, then remained clinging to one another for a while until he’d sat upright and lit a joint. She laughed and said, “Just so you know, I inhale the hashish you get and at the end of the day I’m so stoned I can’t do a thing in the house.”

  He took a drag, blew the smoke playfully in her face, and said, “Our Lord sent us hashish as a blessing, so we can put up with the stupidity of other people.”

  He finished the joint and gazed at her naked body. He ran his hand over her plump arm, then fondled her full, smooth breasts and his lust blossomed anew. He took her in his arms and put his tongue in her mou
th, to begin a new round of passion. Suddenly, however, they heard a loud knocking on the door of the flat.

  6

  Dear Asmaa,

  Thank you for your confidence in me. Of course I’d be happy to be your friend. I too need a friend who understands me. I often feel alone, even when surrounded by people. Would you believe it if I told you I’d been hoping for a chance to make your acquaintance? Something made me feel comfortable in your presence, and after I read your letter, I came to admire you even more, as a liberated, cultured young woman fighting for change through the Enough! movement—one who isn’t on a mission to get a contract to work in the Gulf or find a rich husband, one fighting corruption and demanding justice and freedom. To which must be added, of course, your authentically Egyptian beauty, your long black hair, your black eyes, and that delicate smile that makes your wonderful dimples appear. All these things grant you an irresistible charm. (If you find these words offensive, cross them out and accept my apologies. I’ve got used to saying whatever I think frankly. Che Guevara has a wonderful sentence: “Honourable behaviour is always saying what you believe and always doing what you say.” It’s something I try to put into practice.) Now I’d like to introduce myself to you.

  I’m an only son and have one sister, Maryam, who is a law student. I have left my family’s home in El Abbasiya and live in a studio flat on Sherifein Street in the centre of the city, next to the old broadcasting building. Naturally, I visit my family every week and phone every day to check that they’re okay, but living apart from them has spared them lots of the difficulties caused by my political activities. My late father, Gamal Saqqa, was a lawyer and a fighter for socialism. I graduated from Cairo University, Department of Chemistry, and I work as an engineer at the Bellini cement factory. It used to be called Eastern Company, and was the largest and oldest cement factory in the Middle East, making more than a billion Egyptian pounds profit every year. Then it was sold to the Italian company, Bellini, the Egyptian government retaining a 35 per cent share, while Bellini owns a further three Egyptian cement companies outright. The Italian company has deliberately neglected the factory and as a result it has begun to operate at a loss and the company has transferred all the new machines to its other companies, because they produce pure profit. I should be considered lucky compared to my fellow graduates of the Faculty of Engineering because when I graduated I was able to find a job in my own area of specialisation. Credit for that goes to the intervention of the factory’s manager, Essam Shaalan, who was a friend of my late father and his comrade in the Struggle. Every day, I do battle as a member of the union committee, just as you do at the school, defending the workers’ rights against the Italian management, which steals from them brazenly and seeks the aid of National Security to repress them. I agree with you: we are indeed living in a swamp, but we must never give in or despair. We will change this country, Asmaa! I swear to God we will change it! But changing things won’t be easy. We will face many difficulties, but shall be victorious in the end.