“Yes. Awful.”
Khalil wishes he hadn’t watched the video. The sticks, the crowd, the lifeless bodies dragged through the streets in merciless ecstasy. His mind replays the nights patrolling Tahrir with Opantish the polar flare burning a path through the crowd, the heaving of hundreds of bodies all reaching, reaching … He doesn’t see faces, can’t feel one night from another, but he can hear the shouts and screams and the sister, she’s my sister following him through his dreams.
“Of course”—the lawyer looks up from his papers—“the Shia’s beliefs are alien to our society.”
Every day a piece of the country falls into the sea, washes into the desert. A train crashes into a microbus full of schoolchildren. A building collapses onto the poor families who called it home. A factory burns down. The river is poisoned. Khalil stands at the edge of the elevator, prepares—like every day—for its floor to fall out, rehearses his last thoughts on the long climb up.
The irony of our one and only sure victory being both pyrrhic and compromising.
@Alaa
5:39 AM–26 June 2013
JUNE 28: BROTHERHOOD MILITIAS ATTACK ALEXANDRIA PROTEST WITH SHOTGUNS
Morsi berates the nation for two and a half hours, his voice following Mariam around as she walks through Downtown.
Every revolution has enemies.
It will be terrible, the thirtieth, and all she can think about is her eyes. Everything else is out of her hands, but she can at least try to keep the buckshot out of her eyes.
The twenty-fifth of January revolution belongs to its people. It was a single revolution.
She counts her friends, trying to work out how many sets of goggles she needs. She walks up Talaat Harb toward the old Opera and on every screen she passes is Morsi.
We have to operate to remove the worm from the nation’s body.
Twenty. She needs twenty sets of goggles. She counts again. When she finds the shop Morsi is still speaking, shouting now, shaking his finger at his impertinent subjects.
Some people are abusing some of the freedom we’re giving them!
Industrial goggles are expensive. She digs into the bottom of her bag for the envelope with the month’s rent and hands it over.
The armed forces deserve the respect of all Egypt’s citizens for choosing to side with the revolution.
She leaves and walks back into Downtown. Morsi is still shouting. With the goggles in her bag her heart rate relaxes a little and she stands with a crowd gathered around a kiosk to watch.
My last message is to the corrupt troublemakers among us: Choose sides, you crooks. Your days are over.
A young man walks out into the middle of the street and chants at the top of his lungs:
“Down, down with the Morshid’s rule!”
His chant echoes back from a dozen more voices. Enraged, the cafés of downtown empty into the streets.
“Not a single concession, the motherfucker. Nothing!”
“He calls himself a Muslim and not a word about the Shia men murdered.”
“I’ll break that finger of his and shove it up him if he doesn’t stop shaking it at me.”
“The nerve!”
“You heard how he addressed the police? He’s giving them the green light.”
“Everyone who’s against him is a thug? Really? That’s the best he’s got?”
“He’s finished! He knows it! You can see he’s terrified!”
“Looks like June thirtieth is going ahead as planned…”
JUNE 29: ARMY DEPLOYS TO SECURE GOVERNMENT MINISTRIES
Six half-drunk Stella bottles sit on the table, cigarettes burn in the ashtrays, counting down the minutes. Anticipation hangs over the whole city. Morsi is on the television above them. Highlights of his speech being looped and dissected by talk-show panelists. Sixteen hours to go.
The waiter comes over. “Hello, Mariam. What can I get you?”
“How bad is the whiskey?” Rania cuts in.
“It’s not bad at all, Rania,” the waiter says.
“We’ll have seven.”
“Fucking hell,” Mariam says.
“Well, we can’t sit here just waiting to die all night! And if we’re checking out tomorrow, then what’s one last hangover?”
She was expecting a laugh but everyone is too nervous.
“Do you actually think it will be that bad?” Nancy asks.
“I don’t know,” Rania says. “I have no idea.”
“We’ll be fine,” Hafez says, coming alive again from one of his introspections. “It’s going to be big. Too big to attack.”
When the drinks come Rania holds up her glass: “To the inevitable.”
Mariam sees the same scenes playing out in her mind. It will start with a bomb. Shotgun pellets will rip through the air, into eyes. They are coming, through the gas and the chaos, they are coming. Snipers will start picking us off. The police will plant a bomb to turn everyone against one another. The Brotherhood will plant a bomb to scare off the next protests. The army will plant a bomb so they can restore order. The feloul will plant a bomb to force the army to intervene. The Israelis will plant a bomb to start a civil war. The police will plant a bomb for the bloodsport. There will be panic and stampedes crashing into new walls built to block the escape routes. There will be kill lists and men stalking through the mayhem with photographs of targets. We will be trapped between the new walls, we will be drowning under the crush. Can you hide under a dead body? Can you close your eyes and lie still for hours while the last life bleeds out of the stranger on top of you? You will hold your breath in the silence of the dead street and listen as they walk through the wreckage, grinding their boots into open wounds, closer, closer, executing the flesh that flinches. It will start with a bomb and the survivors will march on the Brotherhood camp to take their vengeance and the civil war will begin. It will start with a bomb and there will be no escape. Rania slams her shot glass down on the table: “Again!”
JUNE 30: ZERO HOUR: EGYPT AWAITS HER FATE
They dress in silence, the morning sun bright through the window, the street outside quiet as winter. He steps onto the balcony. There is a momentum long out of our control. Can’t we not go? Just say it. Can’t we be sick or tired or scared and just stay home?
“If Morsi would just … I don’t know—a single concession is all it needed,” Khalil says.
Mariam puts two pairs of goggles aside for them, starts packing her usual bag. “He’s not going to budge,” she says. Spare clothes, bandages, antiseptic spray, scissors, newspaper, money, lighter, phone charger, gas mask, pepper spray, switchblade. “Whatever’s coming today: they have a plan.”
“So we’re walking into a trap,” he says.
“It’s too late to do anything about it,” she says.
“They all have plans and we don’t.”
“We never have plans.”
“Yeah. Our great strength.”
“It is our strength,” she says.
He doesn’t reply.
“What would you prefer? Planning for more elections supervised by the army?”
“No, I’m happy to spend my life marching and protesting against each shitty government that comes in because I’m too pure to take a shot at actually governing.”
“If what you want is to play politics, why don’t you go pick a party?”
“I just want to know what I’m risking my life for. What the plan is. Since when is that an absurd question?”
“Dying for a plan is called being in the army. Dying for something new is a revolution.”
“You sound seriously nuts right now.”
“So stay home. No one’s forcing you out.”
“I’m not going to stay home and watch you all get killed on television.”
She’s silent.
Then, softer, she says, “Look—you’re marching for early elections. You’re marching against the next dictator. You’re marching to bring down a fascist. What more is there?”
&nb
sp; “And the army?”
“They got burned so badly last time they were in charge. There’s no way they want the spotlight again.”
“But isn’t it better just to vote Morsi out?”
“Well, that’s the demand, isn’t it? More of your elections. We’re just not going to give them three more years to prepare. Look at just one year. Look at their Renaissance project, look at what’s happening to the country. People are being lynched. We are being dragged to a very fucking dark place.”
JUNE 30: MORSI: I REFUSE TO CALL EARLY ELECTIONS. THERE WILL BE NO SECOND REVOLUTION.
Khalil scans the rooftops, tries to see beyond the march to whatever is waiting ahead. Mariam is in the middle of the crowd. He hangs to the side, keeps one eye on her.
The drumbeat pulls up the familiar words, the old strength.
The people!
Demand!
The fall of the regime!
A group of Ultras chant with anger, their drum pushing the march forward. A large sign held high between several people reads:
NO TO THE BROTHERHOOD, THE ARMY, & THE POLICE. THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES.
Khalil searches across the rooftops for the glint of a sniper’s rifle. When it begins, will we all just run, alone, or will we still stand together?
Then he sees Hafez. “Where the fuck were you?” Khalil says.
“Huh? Me?”
“Yes, fucking you. We said we’d meet at one. I’ve been looking for you.”
“I was working. What’s your problem?”
“We said we’d meet at one. We have to all stick together today.”
“Fine. Calm down. We’re all fine. Have you been to the palace yet?”
“No. Because we said we’d meet here.”
“Well, there’s a fuckload of people over there.”
At the turn into Khalifa Ma’moun the street widens and Khalil can see in the distance, brilliant in billowing white, the banners of the martyrs waiting to greet him and he feels his heart slow down. Maybe there is no attack. Maybe Hafez is right, it’s just too big. He walks through the garden of white, the names we have followed for so long. Each flag a symbol of a hundred more fallen behind it.
Omar Salah, whose face caught the sunlight perfectly as we marched in his funeral through Downtown. Mohamed al-Shafei, whose bravery will live forever in a thousand photographs. Gika, who waved in the wind at the gates of the presidential palace. Mina, who flew high through every minute of every battle since Maspero, pulling us long through winters of gas and bullets. Sheikh Emad, whose hands bless Mohamed Mahmoud Street, the heart of our urban necropolis. Khaled Said, to whose life we owe everything.
He sees Rania and Rosa standing in the shadows of the flags, enclosed in a rare garden of calm, the white cloth, the faces fluttering in the wind, looking down at them. Hundreds of people are flowing quietly through, the moment of transition between the energy of the revolutionists’ march and the crowd massing around the palace.
These are, without a doubt, the biggest protests in the history of Egypt, possibly even the entire region. #June30
@Bassem_Sabry
At the palace Mariam finds herself alone in a flutter of Prada sunglasses and fake Louis Vuitton bags and children screaming in American accents and signs saying SISI: SAVE EGYPT FROM THE BROTHERHOOD and THE ARMY, THE PEOPLE, ONE HAND. She shouldn’t be, but she is surprised by how many they are. Where did these people all come from? Where have they been hiding for the last two years? Where were you all when the Brotherhood attacked us along this very street?
She takes a deep breath and chants:
The pigs!
Are thugs!
The pigs—
“Stop that! Stop that!” A shout comes from the crowd. “This isn’t the time!”
“The pigs!” Mariam shouts. “Are thugs!”
“Hey! Cut that out! Don’t be so rude!”
A woman with bright blond highlights is screaming. “The police are our brothers! Who do you think is keeping you safe today!?”
“You should focus!” another sunglassed pair of lips is shouting. “Enough of your chaos!”
“She’s a paid infiltrator! Take your filth
somewhere else!”
“There’s no room for you in
the revolution!”
“It’s time someone taught some
of you kids some manners.”
“She’s paid for by the Americans! Tell your
Obama we say no to fascism!”
“The revolution
continues! Bread,
freedom, and human
dignity!”
A man claps his hands together: “The police, the people, and the army: one hand!”
And everyone joins him in happy unison: “The police, the people, and the army: one hand!”
They clap aggressively at Mariam, a circle of sunglasses and bangled wrists starts closing around her, chanting into her face—
“The police, the people, and the army:
one hand!”
There are too many of them. She pushes out from among them and hurries away from the crowd.
Nancy’s apartment is full of people Mariam doesn’t know. She squeezes through them to the bathroom to wash the street off her hands, her face. It’s a fiesta. She recognizes Nancy’s father in the kitchen, pulling a carton of juice out of the fridge. “You kids have really done something magnificent here today. Really impressive.” He looks around at the few young people politely standing with him, his face beaming with touchdown pride. “So how many of you are in Tamarrod?”
If the MB wishes to survive even a bit, Morsi should announce early elections, and a new leadership should take over the MB. #June30
@Bassem_Sabry
The Salah Salem Highway is a carnival of car horns and flags and fireworks. The traffic is unmoving. Khalil is driving, everyone sits in silence. He turns on the radio.
Across the country Egypt has today witnessed a historic day that the BBC is calling the largest protests in the history of mankind. Today, the first anniversary of President Mohamed Morsi’s election has seen what many are calling a new revolution …
He turns it off.
“So, my dear friend Malik,” Hafez says. “It seems both you and the Brotherhood both fell into the same trap.”
“Oh, shut it, Hafez. What do you mean?”
“Consent, my friend. You forgot that, even if the battle is only between the five percent at the top, you’re not running the show unless you have consent.”
“Unless you can fucking manufacture consent, you mean.”
“Sure: manufacture, maintain, whatever. But if you can’t do it, you’re out. That’s the new world, my friend. Your two and a half percent have to watch out.”
“So what now?”
“It’s down to Morsi,” Hafez says. “Call early elections and this ends now. Or he wants some kind of dogfight.”
“And what about all these people calling for the army to step in?”
“No, the army isn’t that stupid. This Sisi guy’s meant to be smart. He won’t make the same mistake Tantawi did. They need a civilian front.”
In the tunnel ahead men with flares and Egyptian flags dance in hysterical celebration:
The people! The army! One hand!
Mariam winds up her window. “Do you have your stuff, guys?”
“Yes,” Khalil says. “We got everything.”
They are headed for Tahrir. It will be full tonight. Opantish is back on. Khalil has their nightsticks and flares in the trunk and cardboard boxes to cut up and stuff in their shirts.
Mariam’s phone rings. “Yes, we’re on our way. I know … The streets are totally jammed … We’re on our way.”
She hangs up. “It’s started,” she says, without looking at any of them. “Three attacks already.”
JULY 1: DEFENSE MINISTER SISI SETS 48-HOUR ULTIMATUM FOR MORSI TO REACH POLITICAL COMPROMISE BEFORE MILITARY INTERVENES
The flare burns for nights, bu
rns the hands, the faces, burns the road through the crowd. She waits for the next phone call, he waits for the captain’s fist to signal into the air. Fireworks flood the night sky, each report a shockwave shivering through their bodies, a beaten dog flinching. The fireworks do not stop. The calls do not stop. The fist is raised and he falls into line and pushes out into the crush, into the men scratching and the helicopters circling and the flags raining down onto the grasping drove. The people, the army, one hand. She answers the hotline in the Operations Room, they coordinate a hundred people across ten locations and map the teams and the emergency drivers and buy supplies and field media requests and calm nerves and dress wounds and she doesn’t cry in front of anyone but alone in the bathroom and alone in the dark she always thinks of Alia and her parents in the green darkness of the hospital waiting, waiting, and waiting.
Fireworks in the street celebrating the end of the democracy experiment.
@SarahCarr
4:24 PM–1 July 2013
Tahrir is lit by four huge spotlights hanging from hotel balconies, illuminating the flag-waving adorations of Sisi, pulling them like fish toward the cameras.
“Tahrir!” the state TV correspondent screams. “Tahrir, we can tell you, is not the drug-fueled, sex-swamped, Islamist-controlled progenitor of all our political, economic, and vehicular woes we thought it was. We were mistaken! Tahrir, we are pleased to tell you, dear viewer, is the manifestation of the beautiful and indomitable Egyptian spirit once again, it is the common man taking control of his own destiny and placing his faith in General Sisi and the army, it is the corrective revolution to restore us to the path of January twenty-fifth. Therefore we have floodlit it for your viewing pleasure. From the same balconies we used to hurl journalists’ cameras off.”
They have been watching, learning, they have mastered the Egyptian spectacle.
JULY 3: MILITARY MORSI PLACES UNDER HOUSE ARREST
The roar of a helicopter grows louder, louder, louder and a cheer rises up from the square and the machine waits, its mighty noise thundering down on the masses beneath, to receive their hosannas, its body revealed to them through the light of a thousand green lasers irradiating up from the lowly crowd, each a monochromatic pledge of fealty to the metal god in the sky above them, dazzling the mortals below.
The City Always Wins Page 14
