The City Always Wins

by Omar Robert Hamilton

  * * *

  When I stopped running I was on my own. I thought Mariam was ahead of me. I turned back to the gas cloud behind me. The police had stopped chasing, people were gathering themselves again.

  I can’t find her. No one’s seen her. Calls go straight to voice mail. WhatsApp yields a single gray tick. My phone vibrates, but it’s a message from Hafez.

  You OK? Everyone’s arrested.

  I drive while Nadia, Mariam’s mother, makes phone calls.

  “No, we don’t know which station. We’ve got lawyers at as many as we can. We’ll find them, I promise. I’ll call you when I know anything. There’s too many arrests to keep them hidden for long. Just let me know if you hear anything, we’ve got to work quickly. I’d rather spend a year in prison than a night in a police station.”

  I drive faster. We’ve been to four police stations already and no sign of them. Mariam, Rania, Rosa, Ashraf, and dozens more. All arrested.

  A crowd has gathered outside the police station in Tagamo3 al-Khames. I’ve never been here before. Why did they bring them here? To get the prisoners away from Downtown? Two, maybe three hundred people are here. The usual chants. Mariam’s mother argues with the policemen. Someone, looking through a window, spots Rosa being led into a room inside.

  At midnight a fight breaks out and a crowd of testosterone chases a man away, slapping and kicking at him as he runs.

  “Who’s that?” I ask Hafez.

  “That?” he says, straining to see. “Looks like one of the founders of Tamarrod.”

  I look back toward the police station. It was a beautiful setup.

  The gate opens. An officer with a toothpick in his mouth and a gun clipped to his belt strolls out and steps close to Nadia, who stands at the front of the crowd.

  “Your daughter will be released soon. Go home. Enough of this.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until they’re all out on the asphalt,” Nadia says loudly but calmly. “And we demand a list of names. How many people are you holding? Either release them all or hand me a list immediately.”

  “Look,” the officer says, smiling. “Nothing’s going to happen tonight. We have to wait for the prosecutor to call. They’re all asleep inside. So why don’t you all go home.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until they’re—”

  “Hey!” a young voice shouts, and everyone turns. “They’ve taken them out the back! They’re gone!”

  Nadia turns to look at the officer, who gives a half shrug of smug guilt. She spits on the ground and turns away.

  Two cars speed off in pursuit.

  “Where do you think they’ll take them?” Hafez asks Nadia.

  “I have no idea.”

  My phone vibrates and I hear Hafez’s beep, too.

  Rosa shared their location with you

  “They’ve driven south,” I say, handing my phone to Nadia as we run to the car.

  Five minutes later and another location pin.

  “They’re driving out into the desert,” Nadia says.

  I press down on the gas. I don’t think about what the police are planning to do out in the desert. I keep my eyes fixed on the road.

  It is a heavy dark in the desert, our headlights a bright violence on the eight women shivering at the side of the road.

  They are fine. Rosa is bruised up. Mariam is fine. She gets into the car with a woman I don’t recognize.

  “Did they let the boys out?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Then we have to go back to the police station.”

  * * *

  An overweight child runs around the glass table in the waiting room, I have a bottle of cold water in my hand, for the pain, the child’s brother is playing a video game, the television is on loud, the receptionist’s phone rings at an aggressive pitch, I close my eyes and try to block out the pain in my teeth, I close my eyes and see it falling, closer, we all watch it, the Molotov, falling closer, waiting until the last second to move, the television switches pitch, I open my eyes, the receptionist shouts down the line—What!? What!? Well, when was the last time you fed him!??—the boy runs round the table, Ashraf is still in prison, Ashraf and two dozen more, I ran, of course I ran, everybody runs. Nearly everybody. The boy runs around the table, car horns sound from the street, the television crackles to news—political activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah has been arrested at his house on suspicion of organizing the recent disturbances outside the Shoura Council—my jaw clenches shut and a stabbing pain shoots into my mouth and the boy runs around the table and I couldn’t have known, no one could have known, but the fact is I left her, I ran and I left her, it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t need you, she never has and you’ve always known it—Youssef! Stop that!—the boy keeps running around the table and I’m wishing he would fall and smash through it and the TV gets louder with each thought and the tinnitus of the Game Boy and the boy’s panting but there are no sounds anymore, no pure sounds, nothing indistinguishable from the crowd, nothing but static attacking the world around it, a flood of sonic waves all broken and ugly and bonding with each other into mutant monstrosities until there’s nothing to breathe but carbon monoxide and dust and we’re all doing it and no one cares they’re all living and shopping and shitting and it’s you, you’re the anomaly, you’re the problem, crouching in the corner with your eyes closed and pressing at your burning jaw and holding your breath and counting to ten.

  “Tell me where it hurts.”

  The cold metal of the dentist’s instruments presses at my burning gums. It hurts everywhere. His light blinds me, I close my eyes and try to ignore the pain. The radio is on.

  The Minister of the Interior, Mohamed Ibrahim, today announced a successful operation against an armed militia of Hamas fighters under the supervision of the terrorist Brotherhood.

  I try not to listen to it. Listen to the drill, the scraping of metal on bone instead.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” the dentist says. “What the Brotherhood is doing?”

  Don’t listen.

  “How can they kill their own countrymen? Egyptians!”

  He forces my mouth wider with his sharp metals. Mariam sleeps on her back, looking up at the night like the figure on a sarcophagus. Last night I woke up and looked at her and for a minute I was sure she was dead. The long untouching night in the tomb begins now.

  “The Brotherhood would destroy the country before letting it prosper—” the dentist says as something pierces the raw flesh in my mouth with sudden burning pain. Is it safe?

  President Vladimir Putin has promised Russia is available with whatever military aid Minister of Defense Abdel Fattah el-Sisi requires to fight the terrorist threat in Egypt.

  “Egyptians! They’re killing Egyptians! A curse on Morsi and all the traitors.” The probe presses harder and harder, the light is blinding—“the blood of an Egyptian is a precious thing”—is it safe? Is it safe? Oh God, is it safe!? “You can rinse.” A precious thing.

  I spit out a mouthful of dark, bloody water. And another. He passes me a tissue. I manage to mutter a word: “Rabaa.”

  “What’s that, son?”

  “The army spilled more of Egyptians’ precious blood there than anyone ever has.”

  “No,” the dentist says, ice calm, pulling his gloves off on the other side of the room. “That’s all Photoshop.”

  “And Maspero?” I spit another mouthful of blood out. This isn’t smart. He knows your name, has a copy of your ID, can make a phone call. I have a foreigner in my office talking about Rabaa.

  “You saw what they did at Maspero.”

  “I saw the Brotherhood’s lies, certainly. They were discrediting the army to win the elections. Who else would kill Christians?”

  “I was there. It was the army.”

  “My boy—,” the dentist says, looking over my file. “If you hit a kitten, what does it do?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “If you hit a kitten,” the dentist repeats slowly, “wh
at does it do?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “… It scratches you.”

  * * *

  Ashraf,

  How are you doing in there? I hope the food and supplies are all getting through okay, that your cell is not too bad. We’re getting all the things we can together, and I’m setting up a book system to make sure you all have stuff to read. Mariam says she’s going to try to get you a radio.

  She’s working really hard to get you out. We all are, but her most of all. She blames herself. I tell her not to, but she does. I’m sure you can imagine.

  There have been some big protests and lots of media coverage. Hopefully we can keep the pressure up and get you guys out of there. Having Alaa as a codefendant could be good—it will certainly mean the pressure stays up. Is he in the cells with you or on his own somewhere?

  Let us know about any specific books you’d like or if you have any new ideas—or new material—for podcasts. We will try to get Chaos back in action properly again now.

  See you soon man

  K

  * * *

  There is a black hole in the center of our lives. A silence, an unsaid lurking, a word, a place, dark matter slowly pulling all else into its nothingness. A thousand deaths live on television. And none of them us. And who are we, if not the ones fighting, not the ones dying? Should we have been ready to die for our enemies? Did we do this?

  * * *

  Black open-backed jeeps with men in SWAT gear drive around the streets. The air is filled with the white noise of helicopters, circling forever over Downtown. Bombs go off every other day and yet the city swells, its waveform growing denser, lazier, with each new life that flows in through the petroarterial highways into Cairo’s choking heart.

  At a checkpoint we wait in silence. Fifteen policemen with assault rifles stand scanning the traffic jam. ID check. Hafez is behind the wheel, keeping his eyes straight ahead. We’re all thinking of the same night, I’m sure of it, driving too fast, passing a bottle of duty-free sauce between us, driving up to a party in Moqattam, my hand out in the night air feeling the current pressing down on it when we came to a traffic light and there were two police sitting in front of their truck looking at us and Malik wound down his window and without warning us shouted—

  “Hey! Fuck you, you son of a motherless cunt!”

  Hafez hit the gas and skidded off and we all stuck our middle fingers out the windows like a bunch of stupid kids but the pigs didn’t even move.

  2011. We owned the streets.

  The police drops Hafez’s ID on the dashboard and we look blankly ahead and no one says anything and we drive on in silence.

  * * *

  We were being hunted. From the very start. Tracked and harried by professionals with nothing to do but wait. Stalked through the thicket and we didn’t even know we were lost. The July sit-in. The sleepless nights punctuated by the looping Casio piano and 1980s drum machine of Mohamed Mounir crunching over and over again until the dawn and the coming heat. The worst days of 2011.

  One morning a group of men shambled through the square, pulling a battered teenager between them, slapping their prisoner again and again, shouting out to the crowd—He’s a thief! A thief!

  Mariam stood up and without a word trailed that spectacle of frontier justice. I followed behind her. The crowd moved into the shantytown erected in the Soviet shadow of the Mogamma3. They dragged the teenager into a large tent and without a second thought Mariam opened it and followed inside to reveal an interrogation. Hands tied behind a young man’s back, two older men towering over him, cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, sweat spreading down their backs and out from their armpits. In the corner a boy was on the ground, hands bound before him, a dried trail of blood cracking down from his nose around his mouth.

  “Who the fuck are you?” a sweating interrogator demanded.

  “Who is he?” Mariam replied, sharp and firm. “And who are you?”

  “I’m head of security.”

  “Since when does Tahrir have a head of security?”

  “Since it’s been compromised by infiltrators.”

  “What are you doing to this boy?”

  “We’re questioning him.”

  “You’re torturing him.”

  “We’re asking him questions.”

  “You’re letting him go. Now.”

  The head of security took half a step closer to her, his chest out, eyes fixed down on her. “We’ll let him go when we have our answers.”

  “You can ask your questions outside.” She held up her phone. “I’ve just sent our location out and the lawyers and journalists are on their way.”

  A small tick became evident as his mouth curled up to the right and the eye above it snapped shut, moved half an inch to the side.

  Should we have known then? Were we already compromised beyond repair?

  * * *

  The cold has set in. The police are on the rampage, the jails are full, the judges are more craven than we could have possibly imagined, and Sisi is devoid of an original thought. Everyone knows this. The streets are empty. Posts are unshared. The airwaves have been cleansed.

  “You should call Rania,” Mariam says. “You could see about working. Put something new out on the Shoura case.”

  “We did two episodes about the Shoura case already. Did you see our stats? The first one got 214 downloads; 42 of them were from Denmark. We need to think of something new.”

  “No, we need to keep doing what we do,” she says. “We had a medium, we have a website, followers. We have to be consistent. When we stop talking, then what does it do to everyone else?”

  “But we can’t just keep saying the same thing.”

  “If that’s what there is—then that’s what we do.”

  “And then what? We work people up so they rise up against the army and then the army falls and then? Then the Islamists take over? The police? The Americans send a peacekeeping force? We can’t just keep saying everything is shit. We need a new answer. The whole world needs a new answer.”

  “Well, is that what you’re working on?”

  “You want me to come up with a new ideology?”

  “I want you to do something. You have a brain. That’s your thing. So use it.”

  I sit quietly. I can’t think here. Every time I try the inescapable sound of the street trips the needle of my thoughts into a pointless anger. She zips her hoodie up and sits on the chair next to me.

  After a while, I say, “Don’t you think you should have told me?”

  “Told you what?” she says.

  “About your plan?”

  “What plan?”

  “What plan? Your Shoura Council plan to get arrested.”

  “What do you mean, plan?”

  “We’re standing out there together in the street and you know that you’re going to be arrested. You plan on being arrested and you don’t tell me. How is that possible?”

  “If I’d told you, you’d be in prison now.”

  After a moment I have another question: “Did you tell Ashraf?”

  “No,” she says. “He just didn’t run.”

  * * *

  The taxi driver lights a cigarette and the car fills with toxic smoke. Open the window, let the smog in. There is no escaping it.

  The radio, as always, is playing.

  And look at this piece of news. Egypt stands tall today. A cure for AIDS. America, China, France—they’ve all been working on this for decades. But it’s Egypt that shows the world the road forward. The army has developed a cure. And it’s not only AIDS that they’ve cured but hepatitis C, too.”

  I wish we had taken Maspero.

  The driver is sizing me up out the side of his eye and I’m waiting for the inevitable, it will come, any second now we’ll open with the light, entry-level suspicions of the upstanding citizen, and, if everything goes to plan, move on swiftly to open accusations of espionage. You’re not Egyptian, are you? Where are you from? Six
ty-seven seconds, a new record, ladies and gentlemen, a high-water mark of patience and acceptance, a gold standard set by you, sir. Yes, thank the Lord, I am Egyptian. Birthplace of it all, from the beginning to myself and beyond. And you? Are you Egyptian? Oh, a son of the Nile! My! And how many non-Egyptians have you caught this month? Excellent. General beratements handed out? Unveiled women, you say? Christians? Homosexuals? All in a day’s work. Israelis! Heavens. No, I hadn’t heard the news about their commandos working with Hamas to infiltrate the country through Sinai. No, my radio is temporarily out of service.

  Look, the fact is there’s a lot to celebrate. And we can talk about human rights and all such things when we live in a country like Switzerland. But until then we have to roll our sleeves up and we have to fight. Just look at our enemies! America, Qatar, Israel, Turkey. Egypt is a country the whole world would have back on its knees!

  Yes, they’re doing a fine job, our boys. Yes, Egypt is a country that many others would relish lying low. Yes, we must. We must be vigilant. Vigilant in the face of our great country’s enemies! Or maybe we won’t talk at all. Maybe you should get a fucking grip. No, it’s inevitable. Any second now it will start up. Are you Egyptian? Yes. But you don’t look Egyptian. I’m only half. Ah, well one drop is enough to make any man Egyptian. That would be nice. Are you Egyptian? Yes. You don’t look Egyptian. Can I ask what you’re doing in Egypt? Why do you speak Arabic? Christ. Let’s get it over with already. Are you Egyptian? Yes. Where are you really from? Oh. You’re not really Egyptian then. It’s not your culture. Did I ask for it to be my fucking culture? Am I going around wearing a fucking I-heart-pyramids T-shirt? You can keep your fucking culture to yourself.

  There probably isn’t a more important country—strategically—in the whole world right now. Look at us, Egypt is at the center of everything. You only have to look at a map. Look at it! Go on.

  Egypt has become an island floating away from reality. A madhouse, and we’re all locked in together.

  Let’s not waste each other’s time with facts. Anyone can come up with facts. The only real truth now is in how you feel.