* * *
Mariam’s phone rings. It’s early. Very early. The sun is still a gray idea through the curtains.
“Hello?”
“Hello.” The voice is deep, male, and unfamiliar.
“Who is this?”
“Mariam?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s better if you stop, Mariam.”
“Who is this?”
“You know who this is.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to be careful. You have a reputation to protect. You’re living with a foreigner. You’re making people agitated. You need to be careful.”
“I’m helping the families of the prisoners.”
“You’re giving them false hope. You cannot change anything. Not you and not your mother. Okay? This is the friendly call. There won’t be another.”
The line dies.
They will torture her. She knows it. They will come for her mother first. They will torture her. They will come to the house or the clinic, all men in leather jackets and she’ll open the door wide how she always does, never afraid, and a giant hand will be on it and push its way in and the apartment will be filled with them in every corner ripping open mattresses and tipping out drawers and stubbing cigarettes out on the wooden floor before they drag her away to a dungeon, a basement, a place that’s cold and damp and has one swinging lightbulb, and they will torture her. They will torture her in a dark room far away from where any sound can reach her and she will be alone and telling herself she’s not scared and telling the men that she will never be scared even as they pull the electric wires between her toes, even as they rip off her top, she will tell them to go to hell, she will scream it as they burn their cigarettes out on her nipples, she will spit in their faces not knowing if tonight’s the end but if it’s the end let it come quickly, spit to end it faster, there is nothing to tell, there is no way out and we will never know, never find her, never see her body, her face, her wounds, her ripped back and bound wrists and we will not find her in the desert or floating in the river though you’ll be looking for the rest of your life, waiting, every phone ring a stab of unsilenceable hope, now and forever. They will torture her. And there will be nothing you can do. You will sit in silence and rage in the darkness and there will be nothing you can do to protect her. They will come for her. They will come for all of us. The finger on the trigger. It pulled. Didn’t hesitate. One by one, a bullet in the brain for each of the injured. The trigger. They pulled it. The yellow heat streaming all around her, the smell of disinfectant and rotting blood filling her mouth and the men executing the injured, one by one. The trigger. They pulled it. There will be no mercy. They will torture her, they will kill us all, they will burn the world, the trigger, they pulled it.
* * *
There are days, minutes, moments I will circle around forever. The late-afternoon sun dipping over a shimmering lake of people and banners and babies on shoulders and I’m up on the balcony at the One’s. The One, whose apartment was always overflowing with people. People on computers, charging cameras, smoking cigarettes, lining up for the toilet, making plans, preparing sandwiches, changing clothes, breaking down, doing interviews, taking naps, calling home. Everything still so new in those first eighteen days. In the dining room a group of people are gathered around a table, voices indecipherable from one another:
“No! We have to put the Israeli
gas deal in the first five. The top
half. This is a global moment, it’s
not just about Egypt.”
“Okay, okay. Hang on. Number one: The fall
of the president.”
“Let’s just call him Mubarak.”
“Two: The dissolution of both houses
of parliament.”
“Fine.”
“Yes, next.”
“Three: The end of the emergency law.”
“Of course.”
“Agreed.”
The sun streams beautifully into the room. People and faces and voices I would come to know pressed against each other over the long wooden table.
“What do we have next? Four: Establish a
national salvation group.”
“You all know how I feel about this one.
Call it a salvation government. Better yet,
call it a revolutionary council.”
“That sounds like we’re going to start executing people in the street.”
“And who’s supposed to choose
this group? Who is this
addressed to?”
“Everybody. We take Maspero, then we’re the ones
creating reality.”
Yes. We will take Maspero. I can still taste the feeling. We will win it all.
“Five: Immediate parliamentary and
presidential elections.”
“Immediate?”
“When did we all become fucking liberals? We have
no idea where this is going, why are we going to start
calling for elections right away? This is the chance to
do something different.”
“We should be talking big picture,
not electoral politics. This is a
message to the world.”
“We need demands that the people can understand. We can’t stand up and say we offer you the exciting unknowns of anarchism.”
“Six: The trial of those responsible for the
killing of revolutionaries.”
“Shouldn’t that be higher?”
“The end of the gas deal with
Israel should be in by now.”
“Seven: The immediate trial of those who
corrupted and sold the country.”
How beautiful it was, when the words finally came streaming down from the balcony for the whole world to see, the wind gently moving through the thick cloth and the painted words.
* * *
A group of men, all sunken cheeks and three-day stubble, stand in silence under Tahrir’s winter sun holding up ragged posters of Sisi. I want to stand and watch them for a minute. Do they talk to each other, do they check their watches to see when they can go home, do they compare rates?
I don’t stay in Tahrir for long. I’m walking. I’m standing at Tak3eeba and lingering. I don’t want to be out in public, to be among people slamming down checkers and laughing at bad jokes through swallowed cigarette smoke. I don’t want to be alone, I don’t want to be with people. Call Mariam. We can pretend we’re a couple of kids and sit at the back of the big Odeon auditorium. What was it meant to play back in the sixties? Russian cinema? Italian? Mariam’s mother told me all about her old Downtown, Nadia’s city. Imagine, watching that world die into this one. Seeing your streets fill with dust and trash and watching old beauties slowly crumble and these brute brown towers clamoring up into our yellowed sky. Imagine watching the spaces of your world turn ever more uncaring until there was nothing left anyone could think or do or say except to shrug and cast their eyes down to the ground. There is nowhere to turn. Cinema Miami isn’t Cinema Miami but a shotgun shattering Sayed Wezza’s body and Akher Sa3a isn’t a sandwich shop, it’s standing on the street eating egg sandwiches with Malik and Hafez and arguing through the dawn and Mansour Street is running in the dark and the lashing of buckshot and the Estoril alleyway is you reaching over and buttoning up my jacket against the cold and my heart crashing against my chest and Champollion is Hafez throwing up from tear gas and laughing about it and Qasr al-Aini is my hand reaching for yours and cigarettes on Osama’s balcony and Qasr al-Nil is Qasr al-Nil and Mohamed Mahmoud is our holy of holies where the two cities of the dead and the living meet. There is nowhere to turn. You are alone. There is nowhere left to go.
* * *
The air tastes of iron and mold. A large atrium opens, the walls a dark gray, a single fluorescent tube above a solitary desk. A policeman, his face obscured by shadow, sits smoking. He doesn’t look up. Behind him an enormous bann
er: THE MARTYRS OF THE REVOLUTION. Face after face of dead police in their black uniforms. The room is silent. The cells are underneath us. I listen carefully for any sign but hear nothing.
Mariam steps up to the policeman. “I’m looking for someone,” she says forcefully.
He doesn’t look up from his newspaper as he mutters “Uh-huh.”
“Hafez Mansour. A photographer. Is he here?”
“Nope.”
“We’ve been to all the other stations,” she lies. “So he must be here.”
“If he was here”—he looks up at her for the first time—“I’d tell ya.”
“We believe he was arrested photographing a Brotherhood protest today.”
“So he’s Brotherhood?”
“No.”
“Then he’s not here.”
“I’ll look in the cells, then,” Mariam says provocatively. I try to stand taller.
“Can’t do that,” the cop says.
“Why not? If no one’s here…”
“Not gonna happen.”
“Get your commanding officer, please.”
“This isn’t the army, girl.”
“I know my colleague is here,” she says, cold.
He pushes his chair back with a deep grunt of annoyance, walks off to a back office. He pokes his head through the door and mutters a few words. He turns back to them. “You wanna talk to someone?” he says, and gestures toward an open door at the end of the dark corridor. “Be my guest.”
Mariam turns to look at me and a moment of doubt passes between us that fills me with dread. I follow behind her.
Inside, a large man sits at a cluttered desk. An ashtray spills itself out onto yellowing files. Two walkie-talkies and three mobile phones. His paunch stretches the limits of his white uniform, a patina of sweat clings permanently to his upper lip. His gun sits clipped to his side. “What is it?” he says, without looking up.
“You’re holding a journalist,” Mariam says, and her complete absence of formality makes him look up and he sees us two revolution kids and half a smile creeps onto his face.
“What did he do, this journalist?” he says.
“Nothing,” Mariam says.
“Then we can’t be holding him.”
“He’s a photographer,” Mariam says.
“Brotherhood?”
“No.”
“Is he a member of the syndicate?”
“No.”
“Does he have any accreditation?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh.” The sweating officer sits back, lights a new cigarette. “Your friend: are his employers in Egypt?”
Mariam hesitates for the first time. “… He’s freelance.”
“Freelance … he earns money from his photographs?”
“I don’t know the details of his work. I just know he’s missing.”
“But you know we have a security situation in the country? Foreign powers interfering in our affairs?”
“Everyone wants to bring Egypt to her knees.”
“Precisely. We have foreign agents gathering information. Photographing sites of national security.”
“Fine, but not this one. He’s a journalist. He has a right to—”
“Don’t start up on that rights stuff.”
“Look, we just want our colleague.”
“We? So who’s this guy?” He points his cigarette fingers at me. “He doesn’t speak?”
“Only when there’s a reason,” I say.
“Oh.” The policeman looks at Mariam: “He your friend, is he?”
“He’s a colleague.”
“Not your boyfriend? You’re not married, are you?”
Mariam shoots me a look: Be cool. But the cop is staring at me, I have to speak again: “Look, our colleague has been missing for two days and—”
He sits forward, he’s heard the flaws in my accent. “Where you from, boy?”
“Egypt,” I say simply.
“You don’t sound it,” he says through narrowed eyes. “Or look it.”
I keep silent.
“I want to look in the cells,” Mariam says.
“What?” he hisses.
“I want to check in the cells for our colleague.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are, girl?”
“I’m looking for a missing person.”
“The cells are closed.”
We should leave.
But Mariam isn’t moving. Her body is coiled tight next to me.
“If he isn’t here, then let me look in the cells.”
“You want to go in the cells?”
“Yes.”
The policeman stubs out his cigarette and slowly looks her up and down.
“Tell your boyfriend he can wait outside. I’d like to talk to you alone.”
“No,” Mariam says, crossing her arms. “He stays here.”
“Okay,” the policeman says, a yellow smile cracking across his face. “He stays here. You want information? Well, we want information, too. Boys!”
There’s a movement from outside and two more cops come over and block the door. The officer leans forward, his paunch pressing into the filthy desk before him. “So … is it miss, or is it madam.”
“You can call me doctor,” she says.
“You’re looking for a strange man. Is he your husband?”
“No.”
“Do you have a husband?”
“What?” Mariam says, with venom.
“You’re a pretty girl. It’s a normal question. You’re out with this foreigner in the middle of the night looking for another man who’s not your husband. What would your father think?”
“We’re here for a journalist—”
“So you married or not?”
“We’re here for a—”
“Did you come here looking for a fuck, girl?”
Mariam doesn’t say anything. I can feel her controlling her rage. My shoulders wait for the men to grab me, pull me away, to force her down on the desk.
“You say you want to see the cells? You want to see the cell we keep the Cockroach in?”
The men are breathing harder behind us, getting ready.
“You want to spend an hour with the Cockroach? And you, boy, you’ll watch. What do you say?”
Mariam does not take her eyes off him. Then she starts speaking, slowly, deliberately.
“We came here looking for a prisoner,” she says. “We notified lawyers and journalists who are on their way here now. We’ll carry on this conversation when they get here.” She turns and without hesitating steps toward the door and—faced with Mariam’s unflinching stride—the men step aside.
* * *
At dawn I’m running and a phone is ringing and the land is watery, industrial somehow with billboards, train cars, and steel girders bridging swamplands and I’m running from something, there are men coming through the trees and waiting in corridors, there’s a gun in my hand—maybe I shoot at them—all I know is I’m running. Don’t stop. All that matters is one thing: Always leave one bullet for yourself. The men are chasing me, they’ve fanned out and slip between the rusted trains and the reeds and the phone is ringing louder and louder but how can I answer my phone now? We’re in New Jersey. The trains, a Jersey train yard. I don’t know my way around Jersey. They’re gaining on me and I know what I have to do and the phone won’t stop ringing so I turn around to face them and put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. But I don’t die. My mouth explodes in pain and blood is bubbling down my throat and they’re coming closer and the phone is ringing louder and louder and I’m hearing Rania’s voice.
“Say that again?”
I shake Mariam awake next to me as I speak down the phone: “What did you say? Hafez? What about him?”
Minutes later and we’re at the hospital and Rania’s saying they found him an hour ago and Mariam asks her how bad it is and I only hear the word coma.
I sit on a chair outside Hafez’s room. I wait. We a
ll wait. Mariam slips silently in and out of his room. We need O-negative blood, she says to the waiting corridor. A flurry of tweets fly out. Within half an hour the first donor arrives.
We wait. We wait. The sun rises.
Blunt-force trauma. Deep bruising and abrasions across the back and head. Rectal lacerations. Three fractured ribs. Shearing scars across the legs. Electrical burns. Dozens of whip marks. Broken fingers. Multiple cigarette burns.
We don’t talk because if we talk we’ll have to think and if we think it can only be about what happened deep in the cells, about Hafez alone in the freezing silence, about each cut, each cigarette burned out on his skin, about each voice he might have heard from underground and each desperate hope and each minute more we could have been looking for him and each moment he prayed for it to end.
People arrive with food and water and people leave and come back the next day but I stay fixed on my seat in the corridor. There are no windows, no indication if it is day or night. A place without time where all that matters is the next beat of your heart. Men shuffle along with their catheters excruciating out of their gowns and bags of sulfuric liquid hanging from their hands and when I look at them I feel my penis retract into my body.
There is a dead cat on the street outside. Freshly run over. Its eyes still glinting. Four men with mustaches and the loose leather jackets of the state sit smoking next to it, unbothered.
The city doesn’t show mercy or respect. It races on around us and our silent island of dread.
The sun rises. There is no change.
I don’t want to go inside. I watch the corridor. Cockroaches scatter over the chairs. The cat rots outside. There is infection everywhere. On the floor, in the air, in the food, in the breath of a cigarette. It is inescapable. The walls are covered in graffiti. DOWN WITH MILITARY RULE. MOHAMED IS GOD’S PROPHET. MORSI WILL RETURN. THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES.
Everyone searches for answers somewhere.
We must prepare ourselves, someone says.
Malik arrives from London and we hug and don’t talk about the world outside, about his new job, his new life away from Egypt. We sit next to each other in silence. Mariam is reading Hafez the newspapers, talking to him about whatever she can, hoping for a sign. Nancy paces up and down the corridor. She is not sleeping. When did they last talk? The sun sets again.
The City Always Wins Page 19
