The City Always Wins

by Omar Robert Hamilton

  His body lies cold before her under the glare of the fluorescent light. His shirt is ripped, his slenderness exposed to the cold, to the aluminum fridges, the metal of the coroner’s table.

  “What do you mean, is this is my phone number? You just called me, didn’t you?”

  “You’re right. I did.”

  There is no sheet to cover him with. There is nothing but dampness and mold and stained steel. The clerk does not enter. Nobody would have called the number.

  “I’m calling you from the city morgue.”

  “Oh God. What’s happened to him? Oh, God have mercy. What did they do to him?”

  “Your son was brave.”

  Nobody would have called her. He would have been buried in the desert with all the other nobodies. How many other mothers are out looking for their children still?

  “Your son was brave. He’s a martyr now.”

  November 22, 2011

  4:59 a.m.

  His hand lies cold on the chromium table. Mariam wants to reach out and hold it. She still doesn’t know his name. His hand is still, will be still forever. If I held it, nothing would happen. If I held it, maybe he wouldn’t be so alone. If I held it the coroner would walk in and there would be a scandal.

  She keeps her hands by her side, waiting for the boy’s mother to arrive.

  How many have we lost now? What does this do to us? How many times did we warn people? You could have done more. There is always something. Nothing is fixed. Nothing until death. We could have stopped this. We could have fought back harder, earlier. What if we hadn’t left the square the day Mubarak stepped down? If five minutes had been different. If one word had been spoken different. We should have been different—because you only know one way. You with your trucks of malnourished men plucked from the countryside to throw rocks at their own people in strange cities and stand as cannon fodder for the officers and their shotguns and their body armor. This is what you have? This is the miserable power you want to cling to? Your slave army to work your factories and fields on conscription, your pasta production and air-conditioning units and men’s clubs and salmon-pink walls? This is what you’ll go to war against your own people for?

  She picks up the boy’s cold hand and holds it gently in hers, she hears the rain of bullets and the echo of death and remembers Khalil, that first night, hiding off Tahrir as the army’s metal ricocheted across Downtown. Months ago now. April eighth. They ran and hid and stopped in the dark of the stairwell and she pulled at his shirt and ran her hands over his body. “Are you shot?” she kept saying. “Are you shot? Are you shot?” As she checked his trousers for the wet warmth of blood: “Are you shot? Are you shot?” And then his hands were on her and he wasn’t shot and his hands were in her hair and on her back and neither of them were bleeding and neither of them were dead.

  November 22, 2011

  5:21 a.m.

  The mother will need help. And how many more mothers, too? How many bodies are waiting inside the aluminum fridges for their uncles to wash them? She wants to open a door but she’s afraid. What if each fridge has five bodies stuffed inside it? What if they are rotting unrefrigerated? She does not move from next to the boy, his body turning yellow under the cold strip light. She strokes the top of his hand and sees now Verena clasping her husband’s hand to her chest in the morgue after Maspero, tastes the last breaths of the dead coating her throat, lying deep in her lungs. The end comes so quickly.

  We could have done more. We could always have done more. We should have made people listen sooner. We were too slow and now they’ve made their deal with the Brotherhood and all we have is rocks. The Brotherhood keeps the peace and the army keeps their bank accounts. The elections are upon us, the trap is set. They think elections can end the revolution? They think that’s all it takes. Khalil is thinking about voting. How can he even think about it? What is he thinking? What are we supposed to do—pack up in the morgue and quietly file into the polling station? That’s what this is for? That’s what this death is for? To be forgotten with a ballot?

  November 22, 2011

  5:44 a.m.

  Once, deep inside the fluorescence of a government building—it must have been the Mogamma3—standing in the eternal queue, she broke down in tears. Mariam remembers it perfectly. The cruelty of it. The bureaucratic disdain for our precious breaths vanishing into our eternal, untouchable wake; seconds gifted to us by millions of unrepeatable accidents and divine chemical coincidences burning up before her eyes, evaporating off her body, out of all their souls into the earthly certainty of state bureaucracy. She clutched at her chest and ran out into the waiting winter. How short life is. Life is to be lived and death is to be feared and hated and remembered and resisted every day. There is only now, there is not even tomorrow. A life that others will talk about when it leaves us. That’s the goal. A life that conquers death with memory. She does not know the boy’s name.

  Her phone vibrates:

  Hello. My son is missing. I was given your number. I think the army has him. I was told you can help.

  She pulls a pen and battered notepad out of her back pocket and adds the new phone number to her list for the morning.

  UMM X

  She saw the pen in his hands, saw the numbers climbing up his arm, her numbers. She hadn’t seen a pen in his hand since he stopped school. A part of her was proud. Then she understood better. Then she should have locked him in the house. She should have taken his phone, called her brother, and barricaded the door. She should have called her brother and sent him out of the city to the village. She should have taken his shoes and cut them up. She should have locked the door and melted the key. She knew, she knew he was watching that video on his own in his room. What kind of mother lets her son do that? How could you hear it, the pleading in the dead of night, and not take it from him? Please, basha, please, no more. Please, please, no more. How many times did he watch the video, the grainy image, his father’s humiliation, the policeman’s stick, the bloody ropes. Please, basha, please please I beg you. Words that have haunted us all for years, words I hear in the glint of every knife, in the shine of this metal table. How can you hear your son listening to that filth and not take it away from him? Were you afraid of him, a little? Did you know that he wouldn’t give it to you? That he would have to have his revenge? You couldn’t have taken it from him. You knew from the first time you saw him, sitting in the corner, the phone in his hand, his father’s voice pleading from the past, the police whip cracking through the night. You knew, you knew. And now they’ve taken your boy too.

  November 22, 2011

  6:47 a.m.

  Mariam emerges into the daylight and doesn’t understand when she sees Khalil sitting on the low wall outside the morgue. Someone else is dead, she thinks.

  “What are you doing here?” she says.

  He stands up. “I thought you’d need a ride home.”

  “Thank you.” She puts her arm around his shoulders and when she sees the car her body wakes to its tiredness and her legs tremble a little. She sits and melts into the deep seat, her bones, skin, hair all heavy with relief on sitting down. She puts her hand on his knee.

  “You want to go home?” she asks.

  “Why? You want to go to the front?”

  “Let’s just take a look,” she says.

  November 22, 2011

  7:39 a.m.

  In the dawn there is a waiting. A comedown. The dark possibility of the night is over and the real world has survived it and is growing in strength all around her as shops open and the first buses roar past, and soon all that’ll be left is the need for a shower to wash off the night’s chemical accelerants. The rising sun seeps a dull gray into the streets, slowly lighting the long and ruined road between the few remaining revolutionists and the police. Khalil and Mariam sit side by side on a car parked in Bab al-Louq, smoking and watching, legs touching. A gas canister chokes out its last few breaths. The police, in full body armor, stand at one end of the street, a
ll Wild Bunch shotguns resting on their hips. The revolutionists, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, wait with rocks in their hands, the stretch of road between them too long to make the throw.

  November 24, 2011

  6:47 a.m.

  They come at dawn with a crane and trucks. The army soldiers push the crowd down Mohamed Mahmoud Street, away from the Ministry of the Interior. The crane drops concrete blocks on the asphalt. Block by block a wall is built. Doctors from the Muslim Brotherhood, dressed in their white coats, their beards cut close, climb onto the wall . One stands hand in hand with a general and shouts out to the crowd over a megaphone:

  “Go back to the square. The revolution is in the square! The army has put this wall up for your own safety! Go, you can safely protest in Tahrir! Go back to the square. The revolution is in the square! The revolution is in the square!”

  Some people shuffle back toward Tahrir.

  A voice shouts out: “What do you mean, in the square? What the fuck kind of revolution happens in a square, you assholes!?”

  “Get out of our way, you traitors!” another man shouts. “This is between us and the police!”

  “The revolution is in the square! Protest safely and democratically in the square!”

  A line of Brotherhood men stand in front of the new wall. They carry long steel poles between them and together start pushing the crowd away, away from the wall, back to the square. It’s been coming. Since Mubarak’s fall the Brotherhood has been courting the army. Everyone’s been courting the army, but the Brotherhood must have given them the best offer. The army returns to backstage with all its privileges while the Brotherhood wins the elections. Easy. The two don’t need to be in opposition. The army should not be seen to be ruling. Each can look after the other.

  “Get off me, you sons of bitches! You fucking collaborators! We were winning! They were running! Traitors! You’re traitors! You’ve sold us out to the army! You’ve sold us out, you fucking traitors!”

  But the Brotherhood line is strong and the crowd is pushed back meter by meter to Tahrir.

  9

  November 26, 2011

  The elevator door opens and a small middle-aged man enters, nods his head good morning. After a moment he takes off his gold-rimmed glasses and looks at Khalil with a disarming earnestness.

  “What’s happened with your friend?” he asks.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your friend in jail. With the long hair. The sticker on your door.”

  “You mean Alaa?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s still in jail.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Khalil leans heavily on the elevator wall. The gas does strange things to people. People are sick, vomiting. He couldn’t get out of bed. He lay down and woke up sweating, confused, the world dark again. The older man waits in silence for him to say something.

  “But there’s a lot of pressure now. They’ve been forced to move his case to a civilian court.”

  “Good. Good.” He turns away with a sharp little movement to face the door again, then twitches back toward Khalil, in the mood for more conversation. “Your accent—you were not born here?”

  “No. In America.”

  “Well, welcome home. It’s disgraceful what they’re doing to him, you know? The army thinks they can just frame him like that. Everyone knows what happened at Maspero.”

  “They’re denying it.”

  “But that’s impossible now. You kids and that Facebook of yours—impossible.”

  The elevator arrives at the ground floor and they walk together to the street.

  “It was nice talking to you,” the neighbor says. “And, I wonder, if you happen to have any more of those stickers?”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  “Yes, thank you,” the neighbor says. “I would be so grateful.”

  Khalil nods goodbye, crosses the wide street and cuts sharply into an alleyway. Downtown is all about the shortcuts, the hidden footpaths slipping through clusters of buildings, the quick duck to the right and away from the crowd to the stilled fountain in front of Grillon, the swinging doors into Estoril, the qahwa chairs that line the narrowness up to Umm Dahab’s street kitchen, the quick dash behind Townhouse up to Odeon for a last drink before calling it a night. Cairo’s alleyways, for a moment, become complicit in your roguishness.

  From a taxi’s sound system comes the thump of electroshaabi music: the new flex from the ghetto. What would my father think of this new music, of its rebellious genesis in the street and the young and the disenfranchised and the newly empowered? The hip-hop of our time, coming live from the ghettos on USB sticks. Would he feel the connection between there and here, see the line binding Run-D.M.C. to Oka & Ortega? Or would he turn it off and tune it out and keep it locked in whatever strongbox he has reserved for this side of the world, keep himself listening to the A-side of his history?

  It was music that brought Khalil to Egypt. He would learn the qanun, would navigate the worlds of meaning bound tight in its seventy-two strings and speak in subtleties beyond language through its quarter tones. The qanun. The Law. Whole universes of potential wait tight and tense in its hollow. The qanun would be his home. He would be the one to reclaim that most majestic of sounds from the Orientalists, he would carve out a place for it in the future, in the modern, bring it bright and new into the digital world.

  Who would have guessed, just a few months ago, that we would be here? How far away now, those long weekends in Kofi’s garage drinking PBRs and scratching away at songs; Friday afternoons dragging on in the library waiting for the clock to hit six and apologizing to the homeless men returned out into the cold; sleepless nights in Diane’s bedroom with its black curtains and Hopper posters and small green chair piled high with clothes and her unrelentingly innocent desperation to understand. Do they have internet in Palestine? Yes, Diane, they have internet in Palestine. But doesn’t the wall save lives? No, Diane, the wall is an apartheid landgrab. Couldn’t they just go to Jordan? Who, Diane? The … Palestinians? No, Diane, that would be ethnic cleansing, let’s not talk any more about it. Oh, but I want to understand.

  He turns into an unmarked door and heads up the granite staircase to the Greek Club. You don’t need to call anyone, just walk in and there’ll be tables of revolutionists, men and women thrown together in Tahrir Square and working now to push the revolution on into the future. Activists and filmmakers and journalists and psychotherapists and urbanists and historians and lawyers and more arriving every day: diaspora Egyptians returning to help build the new country; international activists looking for a way to unlock the new world; artists and academics intrigued by the great surprise sprung that is changing everything.

  Khalil pushes open the high wooden door, greets the manager, and catches a glimpse of himself as he walks past the mirror, his black hair growing untidy, and even from here he can see the first grays emerging at his temples. He walks through the bar, past tables of familiar faces talking unfamiliar ideas: the dissidents of the early blogosphere discussing how to crowdsource a new constitution; the cineastes of Adly Street drafting a manifesto for a new union of regional artists; the journalists raising funds to establish a publicly owned television station; the media activists hatching plans for a global archive of political film; the experimental coalition of actors and therapists building a public art space for at-risk children; and at the back of the room a man is tinkering out a Lionel Richie song on the grand piano.

  Khalil stops for a moment to listen. Then hears Rania.

  “Arash!” Rania shouts. “Come in. Meet everyone.” Arash, tall, smartly dressed, bookish, signals hello to the group. “Arash here has made the most brilliant film. Did you see it, Khalil? It’s about the Iranian revolution and he’s organizing a string of screenings across Egypt.”

  Khalil pulls up a chair at the long, crowded table, orders a drink; Lionel’s silken notes work their way between the words. There is an idea Khalil has of the wo
rld, a balance he thought he could express in music where he failed with language. Music, his father liked to say, is the only way to understand the world. And it was music that first brought him here. It is music, he told himself, that can express the inexpressible. There are answers in melodies and social values in harmony. Music can unlock the future and through music he tried to build his connection to the country, the land, its history.

  “Layla!” Rania shouts. “Come sit down! Meet everyone.” Layla, all blazing smiles and quick, compact movements, pulls up a chair. “Layla’s written a brilliant book about Denshawai and Egyptian resistance and she’s giving a talk—when is it, Monday?”

  “Hanan!” Rania shouts. “Come talk to us, you genius! Hanan’s working on Mubarak’s toxic loans and getting our—what did you call it?—‘odious debt’ wiped out by those bastards at the IMF.”

  But Khalil’s fingers were not equal to the demands of his ears. After two years of ever slower progress he quit. He spent time studying the law, working as a news fixer and a translator, began drawing a graphic novel, taught English and worked with refugees to help get them documentation, worked on water sanitation with an NGO and solar energy with another, learned some French and played chess every Tuesday, volunteered to play football and run drama workshops with street kids. He worked as a copy editor and a journalist on an English-language paper and earned flutters of cash translating written words into English and spoken ones into Arabic. He bought an old camera and learned to develop film, rolled his own cigarettes, and made friends and lost them again—all, he sees now, in search of an idea, a way to be in the world.

  “Lizzie!” Rania shouts. “How are we with the diplomatic pouch? We need to get those tear-gas canisters to the lab in Brighton quickly.”

  10

  “Palestine,” his father said, long ago, and Khalil had looked up from his computer to see him standing in the doorway, the faint orange light of the hallway barely silhouetting him. “What’s wrong with Palestine?” There was no masking the hurt in his voice as he strained to understand how his son could be choosing Egypt, choosing any country, over his own. Nidal had only been to Egypt a single time, before Khalil was even born. Ugly, offensive, arrogant, he said. Sold us out, he said. What was that look on his face now? Was there disgust mixed in with that jealousy? Disappointment? As if the old man had ever shown half a moment’s commitment to Palestine or done anything about it or even spoken as a Palestinian. Ned. As if he hadn’t spent his life hiding from Palestine out in the fucking snows. As if he’d sat and read bedtime stories from the homeland and cooked chicken infused with zaatar and quoted Mahmoud Darwish, as if he’d built our Palestinian refuge in the diaspora and I was tearing it down. What is wrong with Palestine, Ned? At least my mother tried to make me watch the old Egyptian films, took me to the beach those summers to meet my cousins. At least she was still Egyptian. I’m dying for you to tell me what’s wrong with Palestine. Tell me why we only went once, and that was for your mother’s funeral. Tell me what Palestine did for you to abandon her in the framed map at the end of the hallway? Tell me what’s wrong with a schoolboy trying to talk to his father about this thing they call our Catastrophe and being quietly handed a book of Handala cartoons with a look of, almost, pleading for silent understanding, for us not to have to do this with each other. Tell me, tell me about my name. Tell me why you put this all on me. Turned away from me until there’s no wall left to turn to. Let’s not do this. Let’s not do this. So who was I supposed to do it with? Tell me what you found out there in the cold you can never call home. Tell me, when did you decide you had to choose between the two? What sewed up the Arabic in your tongue? Did you wake up one day knowing you would never speak it again? Did you forget it at the bowling alley? Tell me. Tell me what’s wrong with Palestine. I’m dying to know.