A voice rises from a table in the corner. An old man with a pipe and a scarf is holding forth to a young acolyte. “What do I think of Bashar? To tell you the truth I’m with Bashar. Why? I’ll tell you why. Bashar al-Assad is the only one who can save Syria. He’s the only one. The only one. No one else has the strength. And here’s what else: Bashar is Alawi. You know what’s Alawi? Yes. If you take him, if you take Bashar, then what happens to the Alawites? Yes? Is this democracy?”
I have to put my headphones in and when I unlock my phone it’s still there: Doctor_02022012.mp4. I turn away from everything. I’ve turned away from you for so long. But if we have nothing left …
The beat of war submerges me, the clamorings of men, the hurling of rocks. Our war machine. It would stiffen my back once, propel me forward, but now I feel my spine curling into itself as I float through the crowd, the rock-strewn street, a ghost between the men and women racing forward and backward, the memory and the recording in sinister concert pulling me toward you. With each shotgun’s report I’m listening for you, for your voice, a breath, a scream, a fall, something through the fog of gas and the fleeing bodies—anything. Could I have been there faster? A second earlier? Can I find you here, on the shores of this electric purgatory? Can I make you alive for just one second longer?
* * *
“Do you want to leave?” Mariam says. “To America?”
“You always think I’m five minutes away from getting on a plane,” I say.
“Sorry.”
“But,” I say, after a little while, “maybe I don’t know anymore.”
The familiar silence falls around us, wrapping itself around our shoulders, chilling the air between us.
“But this,” I say. “Us…”
We both know it’s coming. You’ve been waiting for it, thinking about it. We both have. And when it starts there’s no stopping it. Who am I to you anymore? Just one word and the avalanche starts.
“I know,” she says.
I can see it already. In a few minutes it will be over and I will never get her back. It’s the only thing left in this world that we have any power over—so it must be destroyed. We are nothing now but the reminder of our loss. I will regret this moment forever but we both know the time for choices is over, both can see our futures empty of the other and once we start we won’t stop. I’m going to be alone. I’m going to wake up every morning for the rest of my life and regret this moment. Take it back. Fight, fight for the revolution, fight for her, fight for all the things you said you believed in when belief came easily. Take it back. If you can’t change the world at least change yourself. Take it back, it’s not too late.
“Do you want me to move out?” she says.
“No.”
I don’t. Of course I don’t. I love her and I need her and I want to run away with her to the past.
“I’ll have to,” she says.
You’ll never wake up next to her again.
“It doesn’t have to be now,” I say.
“Of course it does.”
* * *
The taxi driver lights a cigarette. He looks out the window, quietly tuts to himself. “It’s not right, these women. See how they’re dressed. They come to Tahrir and what do they expect?”
I don’t say anything.
The radio drones over hissing speakers:
We draw the martyrs of the revolution of January twenty-fifth and June thirtieth and the martyrs of the army. Graffiti doesn’t have to be political.
“Where in Downtown?” he asks.
I tell him Talaat Harb Square.
I don’t want to see graffiti that I couldn’t walk past with my mother or sister. The murals of Mohamed Mahmoud stand there for tourists to see the stories of January twenty-fifth. And, uh, of course, June thirtieth also.
I wish I could turn the radio off. I wish we had taken Maspero.
Suddenly, the buildings around us shut down, the block plunges into darkness. A power cut.
“A curse on the Palestinians,” the driver mutters, as if in reflex.
“What?” I say.
The driver half gestures at the radio. “Our electricity. Morsi sold it all to Gaza.”
I don’t say anything.
“You look like you’re not Egyptian,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“But you speak good Arabic,” he says, suspicious.
“I’m from Greece.”
* * *
The heavy bound script sits on the table in front of me. Hafez’s father called. There was only one thing I wanted from the apartment.
ALL WE GOT IS ROCKS
by Hafez Mansour
Draft 21.9.2013
He changed the title.
Each page is covered in heavy handwritten annotations. Dozens of new pages are stuffed in between the old ones. Typewritten, handwritten:
SCENES STILL TO COME D2
5:00 Siege of Sayyeda Zeinab police station
5:27: State TV announces curfew
6:01 p.m.: NDP HQ in Cairo ablaze—man inside looking for papers
6–8 p.m.: Police retreat completely. Suez, Alex, & Cairo
10:12 p.m.: All flights suspended
10:57 p.m.: Army fully in position now
Midnight: Mubarak useless speech
In hand, along the bottom, Hafez has written: Just the beginning. Get out of Cairo.
You’re right, Hafez, it was a film, a cinematic dream of selflessness where the good guys won; an explosion of light and sound and epic consequence with no room for ego or doubt; a narrative made by the bodies within it with no need for a narrator, as fragile and immortal as celluloid; a 75 mm memory to be relived together in our shared auditorium of triumph, our singular inheritance for the generations to come. If only you’d made it for us while it was still true. History changes as invisibly as the future, though more painfully in having tasted what is lost.
I flick toward the end.
INT. TELEVISION STUDIO - NIGHT
A CHAIR crashes against a door, securing it shut. KARIM pushes at it again to double-check it. Satisfied, he picks up the heavy cane and turns to MARWA, sitting at a vast control panel.
KARIM
Can you do it?
Above them the news feed plays on several televisions. The NEWS ANCHOR is reading the news as normal.
MARWA
I need more time!
She scans the hundreds of buttons on offer before her.
There is a THUMPING at the door.
VOICE OUTSIDE
Open this door!
Open this door immediately!
You have five seconds to comply.
KARIM
We’re running out of time.
MARWA
I’ve got it.
She flicks a series of switches and the news feed on all the televisions dies and is replaced by the TV. COLOR/TONE CARD. She presses another button, takes a breath:
MARWA
Do not switch off your television, this is not an error. The Twenty-fifth of January Revolution is in control of the country. The dictator has been toppled and the people’s demands of bread, freedom, and social justice will be met. Go out to the streets and join the revolution. Go out to the streets: our days of being ruled by tyranny have ended. Go out to the streets: reclaim what’s yours, reclaim your country.
A thick red line crosses through the whole page. The words end.
* * *
There is a cricket now, living outside my apartment. After midnight its call fills the night’s soundscape, its tiny legs come together and in their music drown out the tens of millions of other lives and machines that make up the night. I come home ready for its conversation, its lament. I sit alone, with a glass of water and a cigarette, and just listen to it, to its unrequited call, its unanswered transmission into space. The cricket is patient. The cricket does not need validation from anyone or anything else. The cricket exists to act and so acts. The cricket makes its own meaning. And I keep thinking t
hat one day soon it will be gone. Soon it will be gone and I’m not sure how I’ll live without it.
* * *
Dear Alaa,
I’m sorry I haven’t written to you until now. I’m sorry this has happened to you. I’m sorry for Manal and for Khaled growing up without you. He will be fine, Manal will bring him up well. It will be hard for her, but she’s so strong. I’m sorry we used to all be stood next to you and now we’re cowering alone at home. I’m sorry they want you.
I can’t tell you anything about the outside world, or the revolution or the future. I can’t tell you anything that will give you comfort, can’t tell you that five years will go by quickly, that there will be a better world out here for you to inherit, that we are all working with every breath we have for your release. I can’t tell you that there is momentum building and an international outcry and diplomatic pressure mounting. I can’t tell you that Sisi is weakening.
There is nothing. Just waiting. Broken by the obviousness of our defeat.
A word like solidarity doesn’t mean anything anymore. So I can only say I am sending you love.
I don’t know. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I’m not in there with you. I’m sorry this is all I can do. I’m sorry I ran.
K
* * *
I’m sitting in the long-abandoned roof bar of the Odeon Hotel. A single light flickers in time with the ancient radio playing the songs my father never taught me to love. The barman left long ago to catch his last bus home, leaving a boy inside in the dark corner, smoking cigarettes. Stella bottle caps arch over the ashtray in front of me. To bloody battles and bruised arms. The hot wind whispers over my back and shoulders, catching and trembling the small beads of sweat that have gathered, vibrating against my metal skeleton. When I scratch at my face I am surprised by how long my beard is. I haven’t seen myself in a mirror for a very long time. I am losing my hair. It is long, messy, it is falling out and it is catching the heat and keeping it all around me, breathing on me, down my neck and through my body into my feet and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with heat, an urgent heat rising in my toes, around my ankles, the same heat that strikes now whenever I get home, an irresistible heat that has to be extinguished before it sears the soles of my feet, before it climbs up into the rest of me and I’m pulling my shoes off and my socks off and hoping no one comes in to see me sitting sockless and alone. I’m hoping my younger self can’t see me.
Are you still a martyr if you don’t die in the right place, at the right time? There are no flags with your face flying, Hafez, no graffiti of your words on walls but I see you everywhere, see you look up and ask: Wouldn’t you have been happy? To die in the 18 Days?
Beginnings and endings. All we have left. All we will ever have. When did it really start? What a glorious start it was. When was it lost? What a terrible end it had. What could we have done? How could this happen to us? Again and again and again and again. Questions. Forever now. Questions. Beginnings and endings. You either win or you lose. Shell shock is a brain traumatized by sound, by violent vibrations detonating through the fabric of your mind, a sonic flood washing away your synapses and leaving nothing behind but an empty, dead plane with nowhere to hide from the police sirens and the flashing blue lights racing at you from the distance, nowhere to take cover from the threat sung through the teeth of watching neighbors, nowhere to run, only the flood, only the end. History has moved on, has left us alive with the cold weight of judgment pressing down on our chests like medieval torture: heavier, colder, more perfect with every inhalation and every why? Why me? Why not me? Why us and why now and what now? What, when you lose, is there left to do? We failed. All of us. And the whole world knows it and judges us for it and looks away as the undead past coils around our chests. No negotiation, no hope, only what will we fill our long and withering days with? What will we tell ourselves when we peer over the edge? What can we do to make it stop? What can we do to make it right? When will it be over? How do we carry on? How do we carry on? How do we carry on?
At least, they cheer, through the crackling TV, we’re not Syria!
Beginnings and endings, beginnings and endings but at least we know for sure that this is a fucking ending. You can say it just as much as you like, but you know it’s over when everyone is either dead or in jail. And if you’re neither of those things you were just never a player.
Even Talaat Harb Street, at this hour, is silent. The city is forever broken by those curfew nights. If I listen carefully I can hear an occasional car drive down it, I can hear the radio—
Bless these hands
Bless my country’s army
In the eastern distance a loud, shaking noise bursts into the sky. A plume of smoke signals itself into the air. A bomb. I listen for the follow-up, the second blast that catches the first responders, the heroes; but it doesn’t come. Hopefully it only killed police.
* * *
I’m flying, flying away, running up into the air. You’ll be back, I tell myself, it’s not for long, you’re weak, your body has given in, you’re out, you’ve no place here, never, so you’re free now, free to fuck off and I’m looking out the window at the perpetual yellow city and two green laser pointers flash up at me, searching through the darkness for the plane, searching in accusation. A happy family stare with shining malice at one another on the back of a magazine. I look away from the stewardess’s pantomime with the life jackets. There is no surviving a crash landing on water. There will be no babies in little baby life vests floating to safety. Crashing on water is crashing and dying. This theater of possibility, what’s it for? Why must people always think they’re in with a chance? You are putting your trust in something higher than you, so why pretend we’re still in the game until the very last miserable fucking breath slips into our dying lungs? You are not in control. You are not a player. You do not matter. You have come to the end of what you can do and here we are, in this dark whistling missile of goodbyes and broken promises stretching up into outer space, a band of strangers strapped in and breathing one another’s air as the old men in the cockpit with broken dreams of martial glory lift us away from the city and the laser pointers and the memories and the police checkpoints. Where you off to then, prince? he said. The policeman at the last checkpoint before the airport held my passport in his hands and my blood grew hot but I kept calm and said I was just going to see my father and kept my face bland through my stomach’s cramps. I’ve got an ulcer, I’m sure. I’ve had it for a while.
“And where’s your father, then?” he said, and as I opened my mouth to answer I realized I’d been clenching my teeth down and a jolt of pain shot through my jaw.
“America,” I said.
“Too good for Egypt, is he?”
I didn’t reply. In my teeth I feel a future vision of bones worn to the raw exposure of an electric nerve, an invalid’s future of slurped soup. He looked at my passport, then dropped it back in the car. “Go on then. Piss off to America.”
I let go of the armrest for long enough to check in my bag for painkillers, but of course I have them. Aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, codeine, all the happy family, the gang giving me cancer, giving me stomach cramps, ripping at my bowels, festering a chemical rot in my gut. Is it better to have been abandoned, or to have always been alone and not known it? A ravine of sweat is running down my back and cooling my blistering skin and I see the video of Ramy Essam, how the camera lingers on the lashed map of needless suffering carved across his body, and I feel my skin reach for somewhere to hide as the long-healed scars pulse in familiar agitation.
There is a shared reservoir of pain that lies like an aquifer beneath us. When all else is lost, that will be all that binds us.
I turn the headphones up.
We hope,
that you choke.
We hope,
that you choke.
Roll credits. You’re flying. You’re leaving. You’re running away. Maybe freedom … maybe freedom is nothing more than the t
aste of guilt.
* * *
Abba Arsenius lived in the palace of Theodosius as a tutor to the two sons of the last emperor of a unified Rome. After eleven years of service Arsenius prayed to God and said, “O Lord, direct me how to live,” and a voice came to him, saying, “Arsenius, flee from men and thou shalt live.” And so he joined the men and women who found themselves called into the silent wilderness of the Egyptian desert to live the life of perfect self-denial.
—Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, c. AD 400
* * *
A crane projects itself into the blue sky ahead. A mobile watchtower. Amsterdam and 125th. Harlem, Palestine. All around you it’s the same, every step wading into the eternal swamp of conquest and cleansing and murder. They’ll never stop chasing you, there’s no way out of history’s one long looping nightmare tripping through the dark bayou and it’s the things, you’re on the things and we want them: the army wants your land and the British want your oil and the Italians want your gas and the Americans want your airspace and your canal and your complicity and the Turks want your factories and the Australians want your gold and the Gulf wants your sweat and the Russians want your weather and the Israelis want your name so there’s nothing left for you but to be gone. Gone, because we’re coming and first we’ll bring you war and you’ll run and we’ll seal iron chains around your neck and brand you with new names and drink your bodies in tea in your grandfathers’ houses and when we’re bored of war we will bring you peace and post-conflict resolution and interfaith dialogue and the United Nations and credit lines and television and when you choke we will grip your jaw firm in our hands and force open your mouth for structural adjustment and dialogue camps and off-Broadway plays and aid packages and first-party negotiations and mediated solutions and corporate social responsibility until your brain is reconfigured with our committee-designed computer-assisted algorithmically determined languages of unmeaning and you are finally and forever stripped of even the possibility of thought.
The City Always Wins Page 21
