“And you?” I say. “Are you okay? Are you charged?”
“We don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Is it about Chaos? But we haven’t done anything for months.”
“We don’t know. It’s probably more recent stuff. We’re going to announce it all in a few hours with a release.”
“Do you need my help? Shall I translate it?”
“No, it’s okay. I just wanted to tell you.”
And then she’s gone.
* * *
And so full of people running and of people searching did the harsh mountains of Egypt become that the desert became a city but not a city built to last but one looking for the city that is to come and it is there that the voice of the martyrs’ blood can be heard and their burning spirit can be kept alive.
—Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, The Paradise of the Holy Fathers, c. AD 400
* * *
I see her standing in the line, the lights of Omar Makram Mosque illuminating the faces in the crowd, the darkness of Tahrir behind us. She doesn’t see me. There are so many people. Hundreds, here, waiting to pay their respects in forlorn silence. All these people we used to see all the time, together in grief again, waiting to enter the mosque, to give condolences to the family of another fallen friend. Ahmed Seif. Advocate of the poor and downtrodden. Ahmed Seif the tireless, the selfless, the godfather to every penniless human rights lawyer in the country. Ahmed Seif, who I never met but whose loss breaks my heart, whose loss we cannot afford.
His family receives the mourners. Alaa and Sanaa, his eldest and his youngest, are both in prison whites. Alaa’s hair is short. He shaved his head on the first day of his hunger strike. How long before you can’t stand up on your own? But he looks strong. He looks heartbroken. But strong. I watch as Mariam gets to the front and hugs him tightly and I can see her catch her breath and they hold each other. She squeezes his hand once more and moves down the line. The good keep dying and the evil live forever.
She’s sitting toward the back of the mosque.
“You’re here?” she says.
“Yes. There’s nothing to do in America.”
She laughs a little and squeezes my hand and I sit down next to her.
All these people. We used to see one another every day, at protests and meetings and press conferences and parties and the Greek Club. The whole revolution is in this hall. We cannot afford this loss.
I see Abu Bassem enter and I stand to shake his hand.
“How have you been?”
“Well, thank the Lord,” he says. “And you, son? I haven’t seen you for a while.”
“I’ve been away.”
“Good.” He speaks slowly, carefully, as ever. “Good. It is good for you younger ones to get out if you can. Just for a little while. Let this time pass.”
There’s a noise and a rumbling and a gathering of people in the far corner. They are taking them away, taking Seif’s children back to prison, taking Alaa and Sanaa back behind their walls and their guns. People start pushing to get closer, to shout goodbye and wave and reach out to touch them a final time. A dozen hulking men have closed ranks around Alaa and are bundling him forward into a waiting car and now they have Sanaa, two huge women officers gripping her by her thin shoulders and half marching her forward through the thickening crowd. Mariam climbs up on a chair to try to see but she’s gone.
Then the air is punctured with the words:
Down, down with military rule!
The huge room electrifies in booming response:
DOWN, DOWN WITH MILITARY RULE!
Somewhere from within the crush comes Sanaa’s voice again. Down, down with military rule! and again the crowd roars it back with everything they have: Down, down with military rule! and fists are thrust into the air and everyone’s massed on the steps of the mosque as Sanaa’s bundled into the waiting police car and the crowd is shouting at the ranks of police and their unmarked prison bus and foot soldiers and guns. Down, down, with military rule! and every face is streaming with tears, every fist is up, every mouth is bursting with these words that have never weighed so much, never mattered so much as they do tonight.
* * *
ABU BASSEM
There are no new words for loss. They took everything from me. My boy, my brotherhood, my reasons for breath. He zips his coat up to the collar. He ties a scarf around his neck and quietly opens the front door, makes his way down the concrete steps, down the dark stairwell and past the faded graffiti. He slips into his seat in the corner of the cybercafe, places the headphones over his ears, and runs through the keyboard motions with muscle memory until the screen changes to the familiar YouTube logo and the waiting black video box and in these seconds a dread always takes hold of him. What if, today, it’s gone? What if Bassem doesn’t appear? What if it breaks or is lost or deleted and the last time was the last time I will ever see him and I didn’t know it and I didn’t watch it as carefully as I should have, didn’t commit as much to memory as I will need to see me through the rest of these years of missing him? What if today is the day I find I have nothing left?
* * *
Mariam sits across from me, her eyes down at her cup, her hand slowly moving the spoon in a spiral, the skin of her arm pale and tight up to her shoulder, her neck.
“The bastards put them in separate prisons,” she says. “Just to fuck with them. Rania is in Qanater. Rosa’s up in Damanhour. If they were together it would be a lot easier obviously.”
“Is there a trial date?”
“No. Administrative detention.”
“What can we do?”
“We’re doing everything we know to do. But it’s all the same problems. Media won’t touch the story and protesting is impossible. And there are so many in jail now. How do you keep selling the same story?”
“Rania would have had a spin for it.”
“That’s probably why she’s the one in prison.”
“Do you think they’ll come for you?” I ask.
“I don’t care anymore.”
She’s stopped stirring the coffee but the spoon is still in her hand. How strange not to reach over the table and have her hand in mine. How unreal of us.
“You got a new job?” I ask.
“Yes. The Center for Economic and Social Rights.”
“Workers’ rights?”
“Farmers’. Land rights.”
You can still undo everything. Throw the damned spoon down and declare yourself a revolutionist till you die. Stand up and take her by the hand and tell her you’ll work alongside her, you’ll work for the small battles and the great war, you’ll work every day because that’s all that’s worth doing in this dying world. Commit. Commit to the revolution, to the struggle. Put your egoizing and your questions and your doubts aside and just commit. If you don’t play, you can’t win.
But, of course, I can’t. It wouldn’t be real.
“We need to be more organized,” she says. “For next time.”
The gaudy white sofa creaks and our silence is quickly filled with the shouted conversations of the triumphant fascists all around us.
Take her hand and commit to death on the barricades. Nothing else will do. I see Hafez sitting under the lamp in my apartment, Morricone playing in the background—Wouldn’t you have been happy to die in the 18 Days? We could have all died heroes then. But not today. Death by whipping, death by electrocution, death by cigarette burns in the basement of a police station. She left you behind a long time ago.
“Are you happy?” I say.
“That’s a stupid question.”
“You know what I mean.”
“It’s enough, for now, to be doing something. Whatever it is.”
“Enough for next time?”
“It’s all we have.”
* * *
We’re walking over the 6th October Bridge. A dust storm is blowing through the city. We haven’t talked for a while, but it’s okay, it’s how it used to feel with Mariam, lik
e you don’t need to fill the silence with pointless noise. Her eyes are squinting against the sand. She says she has something to show me. We cross Tahrir. The square is empty. No signs, no celebration, no police, no nothing. Two kids with faces wrapped in scarves against the sandy wind sit on the defaced plinth in the middle of the square, the army’s incomplete monument to the victims of their bullets. Look upon my works. To our left a terrain of air vents erupt out of the ground like termite hills on a Martian plain. The city’s grand seven-year project to build an underground parking garage is finally nearing completion. The two boys watch us as we walk past in silence. Ahead, the downtown escarpment has been painted. All except one building. Our first home from which our words and demands poured proudly down from the top floor.
We turn left into the Estoril alleyway and I wonder what memory this street holds for you, do you remember when you buttoned my jacket against the cold and pulled me half an inch toward you or how we sat so close together at the bar that first night that our legs kept grazing each other’s or the night before June 30 and our argument the next morning—then we stop. We’re on Hafez’s street. Mariam is looking at me, waiting for me to say something.
She glances up and I follow the look and it’s the street’s name: Hafez Mansour Street. I look back at her and it takes a moment before the words arrive and I understand I am reading Hafez’s name in perfect white lettering on the royal-blue background of the street sign. Hafez Mansour Street. Hafez’s street.
“Did you do this?” I ask.
“No,” she says, and I see she’s looking up at the sign in wonder, the same as me.
“Then who?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
* * *
I’m driving us south through the city, each turn of the wheel taking us through time and the city’s strata, older and older until the new towers of Maadi appear on our horizon.
We won’t stay long. It’s all prepared, all in the bag under Mariam’s feet.
“You’re sure it’s working?” she says.
I am.
Ten minutes later we pull up outside the prison, and its high, dusty walls. The sun is low in the sky.
I reach down and take the camera bag, open it, and pull out a smaller cloth pouch. I check on the transmitter inside it and press play on the mp3 player. I put them in a plastic bag, get quickly out of the car, walk to a trash can, and carefully drop it in.
When I get back in the car Mariam has the radio on and is scanning through the FM frequencies.
The Egyptian Air Force has launched a series of clinical strikes against ISIS militias in Libya.
She keeps scanning.
And tonight, darling, is the night of our lives
Tonight’s the most beautiful night of my life
She keeps scanning.
… and that was just one of Sisi’s recent mistakes. He has shown clearly that he lacks any new political or economic vision and that the country’s problems will only worsen under him. Revolutionists of Tora, please do not think for a single minute that you are alone.
“It’s working.”
This is a special broadcast for Tora Prison. We will not stop working until you have your freedom. We are sorry that we are not strong enough to get you out yet, but we will. Coming up in this broadcast after the news of Sisi’s economic and political failures we have world news, new music, and notes from the cinema. Stay tuned until they work out how to shut this transmission down …
“Let’s go,” I say, turning on the engine. The mp3 is three hours long. It will loop until the army finds it or the player dies. Ashraf and all the other revolutionists inside that he could get word to will be scanning for it at sundown.
* * *
A boat drifts slowly along the glinting darkness toward me, floating in a halo of reflected pink tube lights, its arrival heralded by a low idea of music, a tango maybe, an accordion. I watch it from the dark, sitting on top of Imbaba Bridge, alone. The constant hum of the city flickers in the distance. The boat comes closer. You are alone. They cannot touch you. I hold my hand out into the night, strain to reach out as far into the nothing as I can. Bats click past in the darkness. The boat comes closer, its music echoing off both banks, surrounding me and reaching out with me into the breeze, the darkness. The bats cut through the air around me like an innocent. I think, sometimes, that our martyrs live their second lives in them, the bats, the true inheritors of the city. Khaled, Mina, Bassem, Toussi, Ali, Nadine, Michael, Mohamed, Shaimaa, Gika, Ayman, Hafez, Essam, Mahmoud, Karika, Mohab, Ramadan, and you, Doctor, whose name I’ll never know—sonic perfections unseen around us through the night. I’ve built a bat box on the roof of my building. They’ll come when it’s time. I put it up yesterday and when I was coming downstairs I saw something familiar. I couldn’t believe it at first but it was really there: a sticker on my neighbors’ door. It says Free Alaa. The boat comes closer, the music rises, but I don’t panic. I’m surprised by a sudden wash of calm. A true calm that can only come after brutality. The boat comes closer. It is, in fact, beautiful, this neon vision on the dark river. They cannot touch you.
* * *
The courtroom cage yawns open and as the defendants are led in, the room explodes in greeting and waves and shouted messages. The ten women in prison whites file into the cage that runs against one wall of the crumbling, vaulted chamber. Rosa stands six inches taller than the other women. A plainclothes reaches over the judge’s bench for the gavel and shouts for people to shut up and sit down. The judges enter and a line of policemen shuffle into position between them and the crowd. The head judge mutters inaudibly. I can’t make out a word. Rosa stands tall in the cage, her face straining to hear, the whole audience leans forward, trying to catch their words.
“You!” the judge suddenly shouts. “Sit down!”
“There’s no seats!” a young man with long hair shouts back.
“Then get out! Take him out! Out!”
Three policemen shamble over to the boy and grab at his shirt. “You have no right!” the boy shouts, but doesn’t resist. “Close that door!” the judge yells, “with a key!” The policeman standing nearest to the door turns to look at it. He doesn’t have a key, there has never been a key that he knows of, so he just holds the handle.
I can see Rosa scanning the crowd. I wave and she sees me and breaks into a smile. The judge mutters and a witness is called. A policeman. Disrupting traffic. Then another. Disturbing the peace. And another. I can hardly hear them. Unauthorized protest. And then everyone is on their feet and the judges quickly leave the room. The session is over. The crowd presses toward the cage, toward their friends inside and I slip past two people, grab on to the black wire mesh. “Rosa!” I shout.
“Khalil!” She steps toward me, puts her fingers through the mesh. “You’re here?”
“Yes.”
“Welcome back.”
“Thanks.”
“Okay, we don’t have much time. Do you have a pen? This is what Mariam needs to know: There’s a prisoner in here on death row who’s never even had a lawyer, she’s been here for three years, I haven’t seen her but I talk to her through the wall and her name is Alia Magdy and she’s from Port Said so someone has to get her a lawyer. They had an informal freeze on death row but that’s over and they’ve started executing. Got it?”
“Yes.”
Rosa is speaking fast and behind us the press of dozens of people shouting and joking with their friends in the cage, pushing at us to get closer to them, to reach the fingers stretching out of the metal wiring. “Now”—Rosa lowers her voice and leans in as close as she can to the metal—“this is the message for Rania. Word for word. Ready? I hope she’s well. I have recovered and nearly everyone is better now. We are all eating watermelon, a little bit every day, until the end of the month. Her favorite TV actor is leaving us next month. Got it?”
“Yes.” I nod, scribble, try not to look at the policeman watching me. My heart is pumping and there is an electr
icity in my body again as I race to keep up with her instructions.
“Now tell Mariam up front: We’re all set for the strike to start on the first. Qanater prison is ready and we’ll start on the first unless she gets me a message saying different. If the other prisons aren’t ready, send me a message saying the mangoes aren’t ripe yet. Got it?”
I’m writing as fast as I can, I feel the metal in my back alive again with excitement as my pen races to keep up with Rosa’s instructions when a voice shouts, “ALL RIGHT, THAT’S IT!” Ten policemen start clambering over the benches to form a human chain between the crowd and the prisoners while another five gather by the cage door. Rosa is shouting on top of the noise: “Tell Mariam Samia’s rashes are back and she needs to tell her family. And they’ve put Awatef back in solitary and they need to make some media noise so tell whatever press we still have on our side.”
“COME ON NOW!” the front guard yells into the cage, and everyone freezes as Rosa turns to him, takes a deliberate step toward him and stops, looks him in the eye, and doesn’t move. The guard is frozen for a moment, unsure what to do, Rosa’s body pulsing confidence at him.
Then, on her own terms, Rosa steps forward, past the guard, and walks out of the cage and the nine other women follow behind her. She doesn’t turn back. I feel it again, the current forcing my hands into a fist, but all I can do is watch as the women in prison whites follow her out of the cage and all questions and doubts and solipsisms fall away as I fold the paper with my notes into a tight square and slip it into my sock and run Rosa’s words through my mind again in case someone finds it and the crowd all presses behind the women as they’re led out of the courtroom and we follow for last moments of messages and instructions and jokes as the mass of people slowly spills out into the grand colonial atrium and through the doors down into the heat of the courtyard and a chant goes up against the military and the policemen twitch with tension and they’re holding us on the stairs now as the women in white climb one by one into the waiting police truck, its engine already turning, and I watch the metal grille to try and catch another glimpse of her, primed for another signal, another job, another plan, another way of thinking but there is only darkness inside and the truck chokes out its thick gray exhaust as it turns to take her back to her prison far out beyond the city limits.
The City Always Wins Page 23
