“Masks! Get your Sisi masks! IDs! Sisi IDs!”
I stand before a street vendor’s collection: Sisi posing proud on posters before a photoshopped lion, Sisi masks with their eyes hollowed out, Sisi ID cards. Name: Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Address: Ministry of Defense. Job: Savior of Egypt.
At least fascists are never funny.
The new pop hymn to El General echoes through the street—
This is the hero who gave up his life
Who carried your name, my country
Speakers tower in front of a shop, a bored tough sits with his hand on the volume. The music vibrates through me, violates me.
The one who protects our land
The one who protects our honor
I pick up the Sisi mask and hold it close to my face and I’m holding my breath, afraid, I think, to look through the eyes. “Five pounds!” barks the hawker.
The one who Egypt
Proudly calls her son
I hand him the money and walk toward Tahrir and its daily demonstration of love for Sisi. It is hot. I do not take the mask off.
Bless these hands
Bless my country’s army
There are no cars on the streets, children fondle balloons, young women eat ice cream and older ones blow kisses at soldiers on tanks and pose for photographs and shout into the air.
“Long live Egypt!”
“Sisi yes! Sisi yes!
Morsi no! Morsi no!”
“Pay attention, Obama!
Pay attention! Don’t
stand against the
Egyptian people!”
“The people!
The army!
One hand!”
There’s no escaping the electromagnetic swamp of sound trash.
Are we in some sick laboratory? Can you take this man, this black hole of charisma, this oozing miasma of featurelessness and turn him into a leader? Can you follow the simplest playbook of power and morph this Quasimodean combination of bureaucrat’s paunch, jowled cheeks, and balding scalp into a demagogue of the month to be washed down with your Coke? Identify existential enemy, mobilize killing forces, pump hysterical nationalism onto the airwaves, pose for photos with lions, use basic fonts, invoke mythological pasts, have choirs of children sing your name and voilà: sit back and look upon your works. Frankensisi. A man who came from nothing, who is nothing more than a collage of outdated ideas bolstered by a brute strength. A man born of crisis and fear and shortsightedness, the product of peak mediocrity. At least Mussolini had a chin you could hang your laundry off but Sisi, this tubby bureaucrat whose speaking voice belongs in a bingo hall, this is what we get?
The fascists are smiling at me. I am safe behind Sisi’s death mask. I walk silently among them, toward Tahrir. All around me are men shaking vigorous thumbs-up—nine hundred killed in one day!—and rattling bangles of victory signs scratching at the sky—martial law reinstated!—and I keep walking and Botoxed lips and trousers pulled high over paunches and posters of meaningless words and a rising noise above of the thousands in Tahrir, the swarm, the nest. We will be there soon. I am part of this new world now.
Bless these hands
Bless my country’s army
And how long before they discover the traitor in their midst? On every street around Downtown are men dressed in thick black fatigues, balaclavas pulled over their faces, fingers ready on the trigger, each cartridge primed with a million consequences. One hundred potential deaths unleashed into a world in chaos. I try not to think of my back, how it’s sweating, itching, pulsing, the old wounds reopening slowly as I prepare for the warm rivulets of blood to congeal and bind to the fabric of my shirt, each bleeding hole an unexpelled sphere of steel pulling out of me, pulling me toward the mouth of the gun, toward the beginning and the end and all we need is the bark of a dog or an engine to backfire for a twitching trigger finger to rip stinging flesh out across the hot asphalt with another name to scratch onto our never-ending list.
Bless these hands
Bless my country’s army
In Tahrir the moist crowd coagulates and eddies into itself with the obligatory roars in happy supplication to the helicopters overhead. A woman clutches a poster to her face, presses her diaphoretic lips to Sisi’s unblinking eyes, shouting: “We’re behind you, Sisi! Don’t hold back!” And standing on the central circle, I see Nancy, a poster held high above her head:
SISI, CLEANSE EGYPT OF TERRORISM
I stand and watch her, invisible behind my mask. The sun presses down, I feel the sweat collecting on my upper lip, on my forehead. I think about taking it off to look her in the eye but I can see her hand raising and her mouth yawning open and the word traitor silencing all others. I see a limp body swinging from the lamppost we once used for Mubarak’s effigy.
Bless these hands
Bless my country’s army
* * *
The bag of dirty Opantish shirts sits untouched at the end of my bed. I can feel them rotting with the sweat of those nights but I don’t wash them. I push the sheets off myself and open my book to the same passage I keep reading:
When I first reached Barcelona I had thought it a town where class distinctions and great differences of wealth hardly existed. Certainly that was what it looked like. “Smart” clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you “comrade.” I had not grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage. The working class believed in a revolution that had been begun but never consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared and temporarily disguising themselves as workers. Now things were returning to normal.
—George Orwell, April 1937
* * *
Mariam says she smells the morgue everywhere. She can’t get away from it. It drips off her hair like cigarette smoke in the shower. She dreams of it. She doesn’t see the bodies, can’t see their faces, but their smell sticks to her. She dreams, she says, like an animal, in dark smells and twitched traumas, in confusions and instincts and terrors from a place before language.
“It was like machines,” she says one night in bed, in the dark. “Like machines coming for us. They didn’t flinch.”
I don’t say anything.
“When we got out,” she says, “they were cheering. Hundreds dead. And they were cheering.”
She doesn’t say anything more. I don’t know what she sees when she looks at me. Just someone who wasn’t there.
My hope, always was, my country
That I’d come back here, my country
Staying close to you fore-e-ver!
The sounds climb through my walls, stand over me in the bedroom dark. In my dreams I grind my teeth now. I grip them close together and my sleeping jaw squeezes through the night. A part of my brain beyond reason or rationality takes hold, breaking the bones in my mouth, puncturing my gums with pressure and pain that carries through to the waking hours and the lonely sadness that even I, now, mean harm to myself.
* * *
We’re sitting on the balcony at the Chaos office. It’s empty. Hafez lights a cigarette. Our silence is long, the city’s is not. I can’t bear the sound of it, the normality of the car horns, the unkillable ambient noise of daily life.
He flicks the ash of the cigarette onto the floor.
There is no breeze tonight.
“I saw Nancy in Tahrir,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Do you talk much?”
“No,” he says. “Not a word.”
I didn’t need to see Nancy standing in the crowd in Tahrir. Her toxic Twitter feed is enough.
I’m tired of these phony revolutionist Brotherhood lovers destroying Egypt … Hasn’t Egypt been through enough without her own citizens working to corrupt her?… If we don’t stand behind Sisi now we are endorsing terrorism … Enough is enough. Standing with the Brotherhood is treason and traitors must be dealt with to the full power of the law.
How could this happ
en? How many nights did we spend working and fighting together? When did everyone become a fascist? Nearly every supposed liberal intellectual with a newspaper column or a TV talk show is lining up to kiss Sisi’s ring in a feverish media orgy of millenarian nationalism.
“You couldn’t have known,” I say later, “that Nancy would flip.”
“That’s not true.”
“People have gone nuts.”
“Mariam always disliked her…”
I don’t say anything.
“So no photos for now?” I say, and he gives me a cold look.
“And no podcasts either?” he says.
“No, no podcasts. But why aren’t you putting the Rabaa photos up?”
“There’s no point. Everyone knows what happened and they’re fine with it.”
After a minute of silence he turns to me. “It’s more than that, actually. I’m not putting them up because that’s what they want. Rabaa was a spectacle. They want us to see it, to be afraid, to understand how far they can go.”
* * *
Nefertiti.
I’m sorry, Nefertiti. I loved that sticker, her fierce eyes, the gas mask, the high crown. We would greet each other every day, she would watch as I found my keys, she would welcome me home. And now her eyes have been torn out. By a neighbor, by someone who walks past my door every day, someone watching us.
Maybe it was the older man upstairs? The one who was always friendly until the last time we talked in the elevator. “Good morning,” he had said cheerily, “and a thousand congratulations for us all.”
“Excuse me?”
“The army stood with the people again.”
“…”
He fixed me with a look of grandfatherly affection. “You were part of Tamarrod, right?”
“No. Not at all.”
“But all the stickers on your door.”
“None say Tamarrod.”
“Well,” he said, crestfallen, “you must still be pleased.”
“I’m not pleased at all. Most of those stickers are campaigns against the army.”
“You’re Brotherhood?”
“No, of course not.”
“So how can you not be pleased?”
“Did you not see what they did at Rabaa?”
“Who?”
“The army.”
“I saw that the Brotherhood were armed.”
“They killed a thousand people in a day.”
“A thousand terrorists, maybe.”
“A thousand terrorists…?”
“The Egyptian Army would never knowingly spill a drop of innocent blood.”
* * *
Four men sitting on the street corner turn to look at me. They have small plates of food in front of them, but they’re not eating. Across the road a taxi waits with its engine running. “Where you going?” the driver shouts. I don’t answer. Never get into a waiting cab. The old woman who sells vegetables is watching me, the blunt knife in her hand hollowing out a white eggplant. A hawker laden with posters bellows out to the street, “Bless these hands! Get your Sisi posters! Bless these hands!” Two men in sunglasses and leather jackets loiter under a tree, not talking, just watching.
“Basha!” someone shouts. The new doorman is lying on his cot by the front door. He pulls himself up, rubs his bloodshot eyes. “Basha!”
“What?” I say.
“I have to tell you. The police came around. Said they wanted to know if any foreigners live in the building.”
“And?”
“I said no, of course not.”
“Fine…”
“That’s what I figured.”
“You figured right.”
“So…?”
“So what?”
“So I don’t get a reward for being right?”
“What?”
“You wouldn’t want me to get it wrong…”
I give him twenty pounds. The men on the corner are still watching. I put my headphones in, but I don’t press play. There’s no escape. It is coming for us all. The knock on the door, the quick silencing needle, the electrodes fastened onto your tongue, the first shovel of sand choking you in your shallow grave, bodies dropping out of planes into the sea, blunt machetes going house to house. Argentina, Chile, Algeria, Indonesia. It is our turn now and they will cheer in the streets as you’re dragged into the police truck, they will wave as you’re driven out into the desert night, they will grow hard watching the plastic bag sucking desperately into your mouth. It’s coming for us all. There is no one who will be safe from Mohamed Ibrahim’s vengeance, from Gamal Mubarak, from every pig who ran for his life out into the fields on the twenty-eighth. They will go house to house and in the urinous light of an underground cell we will see each other, stripped and shivering, one final time.
A truck with speakers attached to it drives past and the street shakes with the music:
Bless these hands
Bless my country’s army.
A hand grabs me on the shoulder—“Hey!”—and I spin around—this is it—my body tense, ready to be dragged into a waiting van, ribs alive and alert and waiting for the blade to slide in. I see the scarecrow frame, the jutting cheekbones, the quick eyes and I’m searching for a name. Fuck. My heart is racing. “Hey,” I say, heart still quick. I can’t remember his name but I remember the last I heard he was in prison. Drugs. Assault. Something bad. Something we believed. So what’s he doing out so quickly? “Welcome back,” I say.
“Thanks.”
He’s standing in front of me and he’s not walking on and so I have to stop, too. He’s thin as ever, his clothes are cut up, his skin is Dalmatian with dark patches and scars and he keeps shifting his weight from one foot to the other. After a pause I ask him how he’s been.
“Fine,” he replies, “fine. Keeping on the straight and narrow, you know.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. And you?” he says. “You’re here? In Egypt?”
“I’m here.”
“Oh yeah? You live here?”
We’re only a few meters from my building. Did he see me come out the door?
“No. Over in Abdeen.”
He’s going to ask for money, I’m sure of it. How much do I have in my pocket? A hundred? Two fifties? Too much.
“Got a cigarette?” he asks, and we each light one. After a while he says, “They asked me things,” looking off into the middle distance, “on the inside. Questions. You know?” Don’t say anything. Let him talk. “‘Who do you know from April sixth,’ they kept asking. ‘Where do they hang out?’ That kind of thing.” He takes a slow drag. “I didn’t tell them anything, of course. But you guys should be careful.”
“Everyone needs to be careful now,” I say.
“I tried to call Mariam but she doesn’t answer my calls.”
“You know why.”
“Tell her I’m in treatment. I swear to God.”
“I’ll tell her.”
He squeezes the last drag out of his cigarette, drops it to the ground. “See you around,” he says, and is gone and I’m the asshole with a hundred sodden pounds in my back pocket.
* * *
I go out into the crowd again. I leave the Sisi mask by the door. When the heavy knock comes I’ll prop it up to throw them off the scent. I’ll put it over my face as they pull me through the spitting mob crowded around the police truck.
My headphones are in my ears. My pockets are empty. Just ID and an old mp3 player. Too risky to take a phone out. No recorder. There’s nothing to record. It will be cold soon. The Solaris soundtrack is playing. I walk through the crowd, their eyes scanning the skies for a helicopter to cheer, a falling plastic flag to catch. We are not of the same world. The posters, the cheering, the adulation, the bloodlust. The world is as distant as cinema: the faces in the setting light stream past, each the same, each now dark and sharp and forever untouchable.
* * *
In the emptiness of the Greek Club Mariam sits talking to Rania a
nd Rosa. I can tell that she’s planning something.
“We’re not planning anything,” she says when we’re walking home. “Just a protest.”
“About the new protest law?”
Sisi wants to make protesting illegal now that he’s ridden a protest into power. Smart man.
“Yes, against the protest law,” she says.
“When will it be?”
“We’re not sure. Depends when they pass it.”
“Where?”
“On the street somewhere. We don’t have any details yet.”
She’s avoiding my questions. Why won’t she tell me more?
* * *
It takes six men to bring Ashraf down, all pulling and kicking and tripping at him until his legs buckled and he fell, like an elephant, to his knees and the hyenas kicked and bit and slapped at him until his face was ground down into the asphalt under their boots and their knees kept landing into his gut, again and again until he finally gave up and his body was still and his eyes stopped straining to see if they had caught Mariam or if she’d got away.
The City Always Wins Page 16
