The Republic of False Truths

by Alaa Al Aswany

  “By God, we cannot!” the sheikh answered, in loud and emphatic tones. “By Him who holds my soul in His hand, I cannot trust such people, now that I have seen them angering God and His messenger! And I call on all Muslims to boycott these evildoers who have given themselves up to alcohol. Do not listen to them, for these are traitors! They have betrayed God and His messenger and they have betrayed Egypt, our precious motherland.”

  This was the episode that had the most impact. So much so, in fact, that a high official of the Apparatus phoned Nourhan afterwards via an unlisted number and told her, “I have been tasked by His Excellency, the Head of the Apparatus, to congratulate you on this splendid episode. He thanks you for your sincere devotion to the state and assures you that the Apparatus stands ready to obey your every wish.” Nourhan sighed and said that she thanked His Excellency the General, Head of the Apparatus, but that she had no need, praise God, of anything.

  Using her total control and professional superiority, Nourhan imposed what one might call “precautionary measures” at the channel: from the time she assumed the directorship onwards, not one presenter, male or female, managed to see Hagg Shanawany alone. They could now see him only at meetings, where Nourhan, as director of programming, sat next to him and ran things. Hagg Shanawany objected to this measure only once, when he said to her with an apologetic smile, “It seems there are some presenters who wanted to see me, but you said no?”

  It was while they were sitting in the garden of the villa. Regardless of the presence of the servants around them, Nourhan rose from her seat, sat down next to Shanawany, and clung to him, then reached out her hand, put it on his knee, and whispered, “Were they male or female presenters who wanted to see you, my darling?”

  Hagg Shanawany became confused and a kind of struggle appeared on his face between his objective opinion and his desire for the overwhelming pleasure that Nourhan knew how to give him. Nourhan rose, took hold of his hand, and said, “Come on. Let’s go inside and rest.”

  Shanawany never returned to the subject and the rule became fixed: anyone who wanted something from Hagg Shanawany had to deliver their message via Madame Nourhan, while she monitored everything via the spies she had scattered throughout the channel, such as the office messenger Abd El Sattar, the director Hasan Marei, the hairdresser Esh-Esh, and others. This espionage network fed Nourhan with information largely without going to her office but through phone calls or messages. The only person who made her feel uneasy was a presenter called Basant who had come to the channel on the recommendation of a National Security general, whose mistress she was rumoured to be—a situation that caused her to behave with a certain confidence at odds with the conduct of the other workers at the channel. To be fair, Basant was beautiful, though her beauty was a great deal less than Nourhan’s. The problem lay in the tight, revealing clothes that Basant wore and that attracted the looks of the men. At first, Nourhan followed the rules. She called Basant into her office and said, with affectionate frankness, “Listen, darling. You are, of course, free to go around half naked if you wish. That’s something only Our Lord can hold you to account for. But we, as presenters, enter the homes of millions of people and we have to set a good example.”

  Basant fixed her with as much of a stare as her contact lenses would allow and said, “Madame, I do not cover my hair.”

  “I didn’t say anything about covering your hair. I’m talking about the clothes in which any respectable female presenter is supposed to appear.”

  A silence, charged with aversion and wariness, reigned between the two women. Then Nourhan looked at the papers in front of her on the desk, gestured at Basant, and said, “That’s it, thank you. Please go and see to your work.”

  The following day, Nourhan issued a decree that was distributed to all the female presenters in which she defined the dress code in detail. Deep cleavages and all see-through or tight clothing were forbidden; furthermore, the decree stated that any presenter who contravened these instructions would be subject to sanctions ranging from not being allowed to appear on air to being expelled from the channel. All the presenters undertook to wear the prescribed clothing and it seemed the problem had been solved. Basant’s games did not, however, stop. She took to wearing the required clothing in front of the cameras but on days on which she didn’t appear on screen she would turn up in her normal scandalous dress and roam around the channel as though challenging Nourhan. She also told her colleagues offensive things about Nourhan that reached the latter, down to the last detail. Then came the big battle, on the day when Nourhan was on air and she received a message on her phone from one of her spies warning her that Basant was on her way to Hagg Shanawany’s office. By luck, she received the message while broadcasting a report, so she ordered the director to move to a long advertising break and hurried as fast as her high heels permitted to the corridor that led to Shanawany’s office. The luxurious red carpet muffled the sound of Nourhan’s shoes, so she was able to fall on Basant as she strutted along in a very short turquoise dress that revealed her thighs and that was so open at the chest that her breasts (nipples excepted) could be seen bouncing up and down with complete freedom. Words cannot describe the transformation of Nourhan’s beautiful, demure face into the hideous mask of a savage tigress, as she yelled, “And where do you think you’re off to, sweetie-pie?”

  Basant was taken aback for a moment, but, having decided to join battle, she replied in a loud voice, “I want to see Hagg Shanawany, the owner of the channel. I believe that that is my right as a presenter.”

  “No, it isn’t your right, because you have a director, and it won’t do for you to go behind her back.”

  “Suppose I want to see him on personal business?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning something that’s between him and me.”

  Unable to take any more of this, Nourhan dragged Basant away by the arm, her voice resounding down the corridor: “You want to see him on a personal matter, or you want to show him your tits, sunshine?”

  58

  My dear Mazen,

  I write to you in a strange situation, one in which I never imagined I’d find myself. Yesterday, I went to Muhammad Mahmoud Street before going to the school. Yet another massacre, perpetrated by the soldiery against the youth of the revolution, was going on there. What Dr. Abd El Samad said is right. We’ve been dragged into a carefully prepared plan for the dissolution of the revolution. After the breakdown in security and the terrorisation of the Egyptians, followed by intensified propaganda via the media to the effect that we are agents of foreign powers, they have begun carrying out massacres against us, one after another. Yesterday, army and police forces attacked the families of those who had given their lives for or been injured in the revolution, who were holding a sit-in in the square. The number was small, not more than a hundred individuals, many of them disabled. Suddenly, without prior warning, they were attacked by men from the army, who beat them viciously. Imagine the soldiers beating a cripple in a wheelchair, or an old lady, or the mother of a martyr who’d come to demand her son’s rights! They were the bait. The soldiers knew the revolutionary youth would never tolerate seeing the injured and the families of the martyrs being beaten. And indeed the young people came out onto the square to find the Central Security and military police forces waiting for them. The demonstrators chanted “No to Rule by Soldiers!” and demanded the Military Council step aside in favour of a temporary civilian government that would take over until elections can be held. And the response was a true massacre, as I saw with my own eyes; a massacre in which everything was permitted, beginning with killing demonstrators with live ammunition and ending with firing shotgun pellets right into the young people’s eyes. Do you know Ahmad Harara? The doctor who lost an eye on the Friday of Rage? Yesterday, he lost his other eye. Malek Mustafa lost an eye. Lots of young people lost their eyes because that’s what the officers were aiming at. On
e scene will dog the army with shame until these criminals are put on trial—soldiers tossing the bodies of young people the army had shot and killed down next to rubbish skips. The scene is on YouTube but I saw it with my own eyes, Mazen. What’s left, after our bodies have been thrown into the rubbish, Mazen? I can’t stop crying as I write. With each body thrown into the rubbish, I imagine the joy felt by his family when he was born. I imagine him as a child. I imagine him at university and I imagine his joy at the revolution. And now I see him murdered and thrown into the rubbish. Our colleagues are collecting all these videos to put them together for a campaign that will travel round and expose the crimes of the soldiery to the Egyptians. As you know, the Muslim Brotherhood betrayed the revolution from the start, and they didn’t take part in the Muhammad Mahmoud demonstrations and didn’t utter a word of comment on the massacre. The Brotherhood wants power, even at the price of all of us dying. The biggest disaster, though, is the impact of the mighty media machine. Watch TV and you’ll see so many of the lies being promoted by the Military Council. They keep repeating that the young demonstrators on Muhammad Mahmoud Street are hired thugs who want to attack the Ministry of Interior so that they can set it on fire so that chaos becomes general. Naturally, no one mentions that Muhammad Mahmoud Street doesn’t lead to the Ministry of Interior in the first place. It seems we were wrong when we underestimated the huge impact of the media on people. We were wrong when we thought that the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square represented all Egyptians.

  Time came for school, so I walked from Muhammad Mahmoud Street to the Corniche and took a taxi to the school. The moment I got in, the driver asked me apprehensively, “Are you one of the Tahrir people?”

  I shook my head and he said, “I thought not. You look like a respectable person, Madame.”

  This was followed by an aria abusing the revolution and the young people who supported it, who wanted to destroy the country. Word for word, he repeated sentences from “With Nourhan” and other programmes. He was totally convinced we were agents who’d been trained in Israel. I was still suffering from the sight of the martyrs whom they’d thrown into the rubbish. I let him insult the revolution as he wished. I wasn’t ready, psychologically, to debate with him. I thought to myself, “Even if I convince this man, what about the millions of other Egyptians who have believed the media and begun talking like him?” Imagine, the person insulting the revolution isn’t a millionaire or a general in the police, he’s just a taxi driver! In other words, he’s a simple man of the kind whose rights the revolution came to defend in the first place. I found it very hard to take, that the young people should die defending his rights while he cursed them and accused them of betraying the country.

  That was the first scene. The second took place at school. I’ve stopped talking about the revolution at school because the atmosphere has turned hostile and I can’t stand the quarrels and the arguments that go nowhere any longer. Today, I was going down the corridor and there was Mrs. Manal, the head teacher, standing at the door of the classroom. I smiled and said hello but was taken aback to hear her say in a loud voice, “Enough! Have some mercy on Egypt! What do you want with her? Shame on you!”

  I approached her and asked, “Are you talking to me, Mrs. Manal?”

  In a rude tone of voice, she replied, “Yes, you! Aren’t you for the revolution? Enough! Why do you want to set fire to the Ministry of Interior and bring down the state?”

  I tried to explain to her the demands of the revolutionaries who were in Muhammad Mahmoud Street and that they were far from the Ministry of Interior, but she used every word I said to attack the revolution. Her voice echoed so loudly that the teachers came out. I withdrew and heard with my own ears accusations from the teachers that I was a traitor and an agent. They said the young people in Tahrir had taken money and been through training exercises in Israel and all the rest of the nonsense they see and hear on TV. Remember, Mazen, when you were amazed that the teachers were supporting the revolution following the fall of Mubarak? You told me then that the future would reveal if their joy was genuine or fake. It is now absolutely clear to me that it was fake. They are totally corrupt, and their profession has taught them to fawn and bend with the wind. I believe they congratulated me because they thought that the revolution would take over and they wanted to reserve their seats with the new authorities. Then, when they became sure that the Military Council was hostile to the revolution, they showed their true colours.

  I had intended to go by Muhammad Mahmoud Street again after school, but I was depressed and decided to go home. The moment I opened the door, though, I found the real surprise waiting for me. I saw my father sitting in the living room. I don’t think I welcomed him as I should have, and he too greeted me rather stiffly. It wasn’t possible to meet him like that, after a whole year of absence. I hugged him hard and kissed him but there was still something keeping us apart, something that I could see in my mother’s face. We talked about general topics, as though avoiding the confrontation, which wasn’t long in coming. After we finished lunch and while I was helping my mother remove the dishes, my father said to me, “Asmaa, come into the parlour. I want to talk to you.”

  I’m not going to narrate to you the whole conversation in detail, Mazen, because it hurts me every time I think about it. My father thinks I have been the reason for his problems in life, because I refuse to wear the headscarf and I refuse to get married and I refuse to work in the Gulf; I refuse everything that’s normal and do abnormal things. He thinks it was my grandfather Karem who corrupted my way of thinking because he was a communist who drank alcohol. In his opinion, I am the undutiful daughter God has afflicted him with in order to test his patience and his faith. He said that, because of the pain I cause him, he’d decided to ignore me entirely because he’s sick and the doctor had warned him against stress, and because I’ll be no use to him if anything should happen to him; he also said that guidance comes from God (it being a given that I’ve gone astray). Nevertheless, when he saw that I’d broken all bounds, he’d decided to come from Saudi Arabia specially because someone needed to put a stop to it. He told me my decisions didn’t concern just me, because I was living in his house, and until I went to the house of my husband, my father would be the final decision-maker on everything concerning me. And he assured me that above all he would never shut up about my participation in the revolution, because that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. You’ll be astounded to know, Mazen, that he thinks the country was better before the revolution. Imagine—he said, “I was happy when Mubarak resigned, but now I wish he was still president.”

  Can you believe he asked me, “Of course, I know all about your morals and your upbringing, Asmaa, but how could you all sleep in Tahrir, girls and boys together?”

  He has been influenced, unfortunately, by the disgusting things the media has been repeating about sexual relations among the young people of the revolution. He even hinted more than once, when he was talking to me, that some of the young men were funded by intelligence services. When it got to this point, I shut up. I felt there was no point in arguing. It was then that my father made the offer that he’d come to make. In fact, it isn’t an offer, it’s a paternal diktat that must be carried out and that rules as follows: first, that I refrain from taking part in demonstrations, meetings, or any other revolutionary activity; second, my father has made an arrangement with a private driver to take me in his car to the school and bring me home, the aim being, of course, to be sure that I do not take part in the demonstrations…

  At this point, I couldn’t control myself and I said, “That, I refuse.”

  My father said, “Why, if you don’t mind telling me?”

  “I can’t abandon my fellow revolutionaries.”

  Here, my mother yelled, as though she’d been waiting her turn to take the stage, “Your fellows who want to destroy the country?”

  I said, “My colleagues a
re the most decent people in the country. They mounted a revolution and died and are being killed right now and their bodies are being thrown into the rubbish because they’re defending our dignity.”

  I was speaking heatedly, of course, but my father said to me with a strange calm, “Listen, Asmaa. You’ve cost me a huge amount of money. This trip is at my own expense and the sponsor didn’t want to give me permission. I’m not going back till I’m sure you’ve come to your senses.”

  “I refuse your offer, Father.”

  “I was wrong to offer you anything,” he screamed in my face. “The offer is withdrawn. I’m your father and you are legally obliged to obey my orders. There’ll be no more going out or demonstrations and you’re going nowhere without the driver. If you leave the house at any time other than school hours, your mother will be with you. If that’s okay with you, it’s okay. If not, go to hell.”

  My mother of course added some mood music, screaming in my face, “Shame on you! Are you trying to kill your father?”

  I left them, went to my room, closed the door, and haven’t been out since yesterday. I’m in a fix, Mazen. I didn’t go to school today. I refuse to abandon the revolution and I refuse to be placed under surveillance, but my father put me in this trap and I don’t know what to do. Mazen, I have to end this email because my father is calling me. God preserve us!

  59

  Ashraf gave the money to the young people, who went that morning and bought all the required equipment—three laptops, two projector screens, large spotlights, lots of cables, the sizes and types of which had been precisely calculated, and four dozen chairs, plus the necessary equipment for the marquee. Finally, they came to an arrangement with a small truck, which hauled the equipment from Abd El Aziz Street to Talaat Harb Street. Once the equipment had been brought into the headquarters, the young people worked hard for two whole days, during which Ikram kept them supplied with sandwiches, coffee, and soft drinks and emptied the ashtrays of the butts of dozens of cigarettes. Finally, the work was done and the young people invited Ashraf to see the video. They turned out the lights and the show started. There were beautiful words from the army command affirming that the army never had attacked and never would attack Egyptians, followed by the testimonies of the girls who’d been abused while undergoing virginity tests. This was followed by scenes of armed personnel carriers running demonstrators over at Maspero and of demonstrators being shot and their bodies thrown into the rubbish on Muhammad Mahmoud Street. During the showing, Ashraf appeared moved. Ikram sensed this in him and took his hand, but he went out into the hall and smoked till he had regained control of himself, after which he returned to the room. The video continued for about twenty minutes and then the lights were turned back on. The young people started making their remarks to the director, who was a student at the Cinema Institute. Ashraf said nothing until the director asked him for his opinion, when he said calmly, “I think that the video is clear and accurate. Anyone who sees it is bound to call for the trial of everyone responsible for these crimes.”