The City Always Wins

by Omar Robert Hamilton

  They sat on the balcony, watching the soldiers slowly wandering back from their chase toward Tahrir. “The assholes,” Mariam said, and flicked her cigarette off the edge of the balcony.

  Then she turned to him: “So what do you do?”

  “I worked as a fixer—,” he said.

  “And then?”

  “Then the revolution happened.”

  “Right.”

  “Now I’m going to build a radio station.”

  “Really?” she said, interested. “And how do you do that?”

  Once they started talking they didn’t stop. When the soldiers had all gone, she said she needed to find her friend but she stopped at the door. “So,” she said, “how come we never met in Tahrir?”

  “Because my friends are useless.”

  “You could have said hello.”

  “You react kindly to men hitting on you at political protests?” he said, smiling, and she laughed.

  4

  October 27, 2011

  An island of white floats illuminated on a distant billboard and with an effort she can make out the words: “WE MUST EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN TO BECOME LIKE YOUNG EGYPTIAN PEOPLE”—BARACK OBAMA. There’s a little rush of pride; she swallows it. An involuntary reaction. Fuck Obama. And fuck Mobinil more. She turns inside. She has phone calls to make. There aren’t enough hours. Lists. Her pockets are always hiding little lists on scraps of paper, her jeans are stained with the ink of a thousand cheap pens. There aren’t enough hours. If she lets herself think about it too much, about the lifetime of work lining up before her, the unending city of sores and scars and needs that will never be sated, all that is to be fought for and all that needs to be won, if she lets the thoughts take over, the blood comes rushing to her brain. She should have been a doctor, there’s no questioning the value of a doctor, how can both parents be a doctor and their daughter not? Her blood-flushed brain is dizzy for a moment and she holds on to the railing and looks down from the horizon at the ground to see a line of ants adventuring across the dusty tiles, their lives’ work laid out before them in the carrying of a leaf; hundreds of dutiful workers labor on repeat until the end, unquestioning of themselves, working only for the greater good. A lifetime of lists and websites and sleepless nights can never do the good a doctor does in a day. But what could she have done? Leave her mother to go study in Minya? Leave the clinic? Or go begging to her father and watch the happy relief on his face as he bought her a place in a private university? There was no other way. She’s an organizer, an engine, break it down and take it on. The time is now. You’re lucky. You were born for this. She can feel the papers in her pocket, takes a glowing strength from the lists, the active strikes, the calls to make, the coming protests, the events to push, the grand projects and passing thoughts, the people to remember and books to read and skills to learn and ideas for actions. She looks up at the city again. You are not alone. Tahrir is everywhere, the bonds forged, the lessons learned an unstoppable floodplain of possibility.

  Her phone buzzes—

  Brilliant new episode from @ChaosCairo. Essential listening for the week.

  Evidence compiled by @ChaosCairo on Maspero killings should be used at the International Court of Justice.

  Since the phone is in her hand she flicks open Twitter without thinking—

  Today at 11am. First meeting to discuss plans to establish a public broadcast service.

  Essam Atta was tortured to death by the police and—

  Click. The phone locks. A twitch reflex. She’s not ready for news of another martyr. She needs to prepare herself.

  Website and podcast up and running already, a print monthly in the works. Every week Mariam produces the show, Rania does the interviews, Khalil records and cuts, and Rosa writes the continuity and spits her soulful Señorita Love Daddy intro: “Hello, dearly liberated from the streets of our revolution, today we’ve got news from the front lines, tunes from the underground, and every political beat you need to get through your week.” The Maspero edition has been downloaded seventy thousand times—has played on nearly every independent Egyptian television channel—the analysis of the military’s bullets has been picked up by a dozen foreign papers, a thousand new followers flock to the Chaos Twitter feed every day.

  But what if people don’t take to the streets again? It’s been nine months now since Mubarak was forced from power and the army took over, but the sit-ins and small battles of the summer have left everyone exhausted. There is an anger, of that there is no doubt. But if Maspero is not the spark, then what? How many do they have to kill? When will the unconquerable numbers return to the street?

  No. The revolution is unstoppable. Chaos will carry news, and tactics and triumphs from Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Palestine. Start with the Arab Spring countries, then open to the whole Arab world, then: who knows? They can’t keep up with us, an army of Samsungs, Twitters, HTCs, emails, Facebook events, private groups, iPhones, phone calls, text messages all adjusting one another’s movements millions of times each second. An army of infinite mobility—impossible to outmaneuver. All they know to do is pull the plug, cut the line. And the world saw what happened when they tried that. They have no moves left. We have an irreversible tactical advantage. Divide and rule is no more for we can no longer be divided. How can they control us when, at last, we can all see one another, talk to one another, plan together? First in Arabic and then the rest of the world in English. Empire sows the seeds of its own defeat.

  They pulled the plug and we fought them, we burned their police stations to the ground, we drove them out of our cities. Let them come again. They are the ones afraid of us now.

  5

  November 16, 2011

  “Look at this,” Khalil says, turning to the French documentary crew. “I love this neighborhood. They get fuck-all from the state and look. Streets are clean, walls are all painted, plants everywhere, everyone’s safe.”

  The roads are so long, so straight, so narrow that you can’t see to the end of them. Redbrick mountains lean in on the shaded street below, barely wide enough to fit one car. A tuk-tuk ambles past them. Khalil makes eye contact with an old man sitting outside his shop who gestures at two empty chairs in welcome; Khalil places his hand on his chest in thanks and carries on.

  Cairo: the future city, the new metropole of plants cascading from solar-paneled roofs to tree-lined avenues with whitewashed facades and careful restorations and integrated innovations all singing together in a chorus of new and old. Civil initiatives will soon find easy housing in the abandoned architectural prizes of Downtown, the river will be flooded with public transportation, the shaded spaces underneath the bridges and flyovers will flower into common land connected by tramways to dignified schools and clean hospitals and eclectic bookshops and public parks humming with music in the evenings. The revolution has begun and the people, every day, are supplanting the regime with their energy and initiative in this cement supercolony that for decades of state failure has held itself together with a collective supraintelligence keeping it from collapse. Something here, in Cairo’s combination of permanence and piety and proximity, binds people together. There is a value to society here, he thinks, a neighborliness on a massive scale.

  “The streets don’t look so clean to me,” the crew’s director mutters, pushing his sunglasses up over his white hair and casting a suspicious look around him.

  Khalil turns from him. It’s just a job, he tells himself. You’re a fixer. You don’t need to be friends with them. Every day new journalists, filmmakers, and artists arrive. There’s no easier money to be made right now than fixing. Two jobs a month covers half the rent on the Chaos office. He keeps pace ahead of them.

  When the graffiti grows dense he knows they are close.

  THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES

  DOWN WITH MILITARY RULE

  THE MARTYR BASSEM GOUDA, HERO OF MAADI

  They climb the narrow stairwell. He can hear a television murmuring through the floor from above.
He climbs the stairs to the home of the martyr quietly, respectfully. The television grows louder:

  Yes, Alaa is strong in his resolve. He absolutely refuses to answer any questions in front of a military judge …

  At the top the door is open, a single pair of shoes sits outside. Khalil takes his off and signals the crew to do the same. He knocks on the door, but there is no answer. The lights are off but the television is on.

  He is a civilian and so he must be tried as a civilian. Thousands of Egyptian civilians have already been tried in military courts—and his arrest has brought attention to that fact.

  Through the narrow corridor he looks into the first room. Abu Bassem is sitting in front of the television, a phone in his hand and two more on the small table in front of him.

  “Abu Bassem?” Khalil says. He doesn’t know his real name, he is simply known as Abu Bassem, Bassem’s father.

  “Ah, yes.” Abu Bassem gestures for them to come inside. “Come in. One moment. Come in. I’m just doing a tweet for people to watch this show.”

  Abu Bassem’s concentration is split between his phone and the television, so they each take a seat in the cramped room and watch quietly. He is thin but firm, his grief is all in his shoulders.

  Above Abu Bassem, in the center of the small room, hangs a vinyl poster. BASSEM GOUDA: MARTYR OF THE REVOLUTION. The young martyr’s eyes stare straight through the camera, the patron saint of his own home.

  Alaa knows that the whole world is watching and that the country is behind him and that is giving him strength right now.

  Before long the director is making noises of displeasure, checking his watch. But Abu Bassem’s attention is fixed on the television. The whole country is talking about Alaa, his stand against the army, his imprisonment, the countdown to the birth of his first son. Abu Bassem doesn’t say a word until the interview with Manal, his wife, is over.

  “I’m sorry about that. Some tea? A Pepsi?”

  “Thank you, we’re fine,” Khalil says. “As I said on the phone, these men are from French television. They want to hear about your son. And, if it’s all right, I’d also like to record for an internet broadcast.”

  “Of course.” Abu Bassem sits gracefully in the seat under his son’s poster.

  Behind them the cameraman sets up.

  “So … how do we begin?”

  “Obviously we just want to hear about his son,” the director declares, in English, to the room at large.

  “We think it’s important,” Khalil says, positioning his body between Abu Bassem and the director, “to hear about your son first, about his life.”

  “My son was a great boy. A great boy. Always a help. He always helped me. Always smiling. Whatever we asked him for he would do it. He couldn’t wait to be grown-up.”

  Abu Bassem’s dignity is somehow unbearable. He doesn’t cry or curse or swear vendetta. But he is not defeated. Khalil feels somehow animal in contrast to the older man, his stillness, that he must be enraged for him, that he must do the crying, the stumbling.

  “My son wanted to be a musician. On the computer. He and his friends made several songs.”

  “What’s he saying?” the director whispers in his ear.

  “He’s talking about his son,” Khalil replies.

  “Tell him we need to hear about his killing.”

  “Relax,” Khalil says, but Abu Bassem has stopped talking. “Sorry, sir”—Khalil concentrates on him—“please carry on.”

  “My son went down against Mubarak for all of our rights. He went down on the twenty-fifth even, not just the twenty-eighth like the rest of the Brotherhood. He didn’t want to raise his kids with just the same chances he had.”

  Khalil looks up at Bassem’s poster, at the eyes staring out into the world. He wonders if he saw him. January twenty-eighth. The day we beat the police. Qasr al-Nil Bridge. Maybe they stood next to each other in the crowd. There was a young man. The first life Khalil saw slip away that day. An inch to the left, a gust of wind, a glance at a watch—the unknowable differences between life and death.

  “What’s he saying?” the director whispers.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Khalil says. “So you said Bassem wasn’t Brotherhood. Are his friends?”

  “No, not his friends. But both I and his uncle are.”

  “I see.”

  “I’d hoped he would join when he was a little older. Maybe for these elections. But he was his own person. Did you hear his music? I didn’t understand it but his friends … We could go down to the cyber maybe?”

  “You want to go down to his son’s cybercafe?” Khalil asks the director.

  “No. We need to hurry up.”

  Khalil feels suddenly, burningly foreign with this crew behind him, a tour operator cashing in on other people’s misery, a cheap Virgil to guide foreigners through the city’s labyrinth of martyrdom.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he says to Abu Bassem in Arabic. “They’ve had a long day. But I’d like to go with you.”

  “What did you say to him?” the director says, aggressive now. Khalil feels the blood rising to the back of his head.

  “I said I’d like to go to the cyber.”

  “I told you we don’t have time.”

  “No, you don’t have time.”

  “Well, our insurance won’t cover us being here so late.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here in a neighborhood like this.”

  “Then you should leave,” Khalil says.

  He turns away from the director and back to Abu Bassem. He understands enough French to catch some insults before the camera clicks off its tripod.

  “I’m sorry about them,” Khalil says. “They got a phone call. There’s some news they have to cover urgently. Shall we go?”

  Abu Bassem stands up to shake their hands and show them out as they bluster through the door. Khalil feels his heart slowing down, feels slowly clean again. No more fixing work. For the first time in a hundred years we don’t need to sell our stories to France or England or America. We’ll win or lose it all here.

  “But you’re not in a hurry?” Abu Bassem says.

  “If you’re not, I’m not.”

  Abu Bassem puts his arm in Khalil’s and they make their way slowly out of the apartment, down the stairwell and through the long passages of memories.

  “We fought the morning of the twenty-eighth. I was having some difficulties. But he was never rude or disrespectful. He knew how to handle people. He was good with people. I snapped at him. Said something cruel. On the day he died. I think about it every day. All we want is for him to be recognized as a martyr. We’ll have justice when this street is named after him.”

  ABU BASSEM

  He zips his coat up to the collar. He ties a scarf around his neck and quietly opens the front door, makes his way down the dark stairwell’s concrete steps and past the graffiti that punctuates his world with a sorrowing pride. He walks through the narrow streets, holding close to the sides to avoid the winter puddles that will rot in the craterous center until the sun comes out again, walking the same route he walks every day now. He knows, he knows, he knows he should do it less. That he needs to get his life back. That he needs to love and protect the ones he still has. But not yet. Soon, but not yet. We will have our street named after you. He turns left. The naked bulb hangs over the doorway. He steps inside and sits down at the third booth in, the deepest one, the most private. He nods at the young boy sitting at a cracked old laptop—who bows his head respectfully. He puts his hand on the mouse and starts moving through the learned motions. Click two times on the orange-and-blue circle, move the arrow up to the white space at the top, click again and type: يو تيوب . Two words he learned months ago and never questioned their meaning. When the screen changes, press on the first of the large English words: YouTube. Next he takes the folded paper from his wallet and types out the English characters one by one: kiko mahragan. And then Bassem appears, his face furrowed into a serious expressio
n, his cap turned slightly to the side, his right hand pointing toward the camera, his left holding a microphone, the young man, the musician, his son. The picture doesn’t move, will not move, it sits in front of him and from behind it comes the music, Bassem’s young voice manipulated by a machine almost beyond recognition, but there, and all the same feelings come rushing back again as his chest cracks with sorrow and pride and anger.

  6

  In the video the boy is not moving. His blood has turned black on the pavement. Nobody knows what to do. Nobody knew his name.

  Khalil hits pause, holding the moment, the intimacy of his sound studio with its low roll of acoustic cotton hanging down from the ceiling, the wide wooden desk with two microphones, Mariam’s VISIT PALESTINE poster above it. He takes a breath before placing the headphones over his ears. The conductor before his orchestra. A moment, and he will begin flicking through the sound files one by one; scanning for highlights and grabbing them with loose, brutish cuts to drop them into his five categories: essential, secondary, ambient, cutaway, effect. Five colors for five pillars with which to build the week’s aural architecture. Five colors with which to make the listener see Abu Bassem’s pain, to join his vigil. He presses play on the video once more. We know his name now. We know his name is Bassem.

  He feels the weight of the older man’s hand on his arm and an old music stirs in his heart:

  I’ve been in

  the storm

  so lo-ong

  The record player in the linoleum corner. The LPs long off-limits. The old man sitting alone in his labyrinth. A silent bullet, a cracked skull, a phone call from the morgue.

  Khalil’s father went to study in America and never came home. He was supposed to be a violinist, his parents sending him to Juilliard to concentrate on his career, to get away from the fundamental unpredictability of life in Nablus. Life settled down. Certainties were erected. Nidal became Ned.

  They never talked about it. Palestine. Home. They never talked in a real way about anything. Only music. Music and its shared contemplation. Music could explain more for Nidal than words ever could.