The City Always Wins Read online

  11

  December 7, 2011

  Mariam keeps her headphones in when she walks, keeps her pace brisk and her expression set to fuck off as she navigates the street’s assault course of words and sounds and unwanted invitations. The small can of pepper spray smuggled by a traveling friend lives on her key ring, waits tight in her hand as she picks her way through the little swarms of men; grinning, whistling men, men in packs along the narrow sidewalks, men who spit and men who stare, men who make sure they’re in your way, men who follow you through the dark streets, men who like to scare you for their miserable midnight erections jerked off in dark bathrooms. From the street to the top it’s all the same, same animal urges, same violence of hands, same paunching weight, same father’s flesh, same buffalo words, same brute language. Virginity tests. The army doctors’ vaginal violations they call virginity tests. The police’s hosepipes forced into the anuses of young prisoners. The grabbing hands of kids on the street ripping at clothes, grabbing for flesh. The same siege, everywhere.

  Cap D’or and its miserable barmen. A man mouths something at her but she can’t hear him, doesn’t look twice at him. Above her the Kodak building folds in and closes itself over the alleyway below. She climbs the narrow stairwell that bends up around the iron gridwork of the elevator shaft and pulls out the headphones.

  A meeting table runs through the center of the room with, she quickly counts, sixteen people around it. Familiar faces: lawyers, journalists, filmmakers. She’s late.

  Or, more accurately, the meeting began on time. She mouths an apology and stands with her back to the wall by the door.

  “—and even if we will never have the exact number, what we have are hundreds of names of people martyred for the revolution. We need to know their stories. They are central to our narrative, they’re the reason the revolution must be kept alive.”

  Leading the meeting is Ashira; her voice is strong and firm and considered, her seriousness embodied by her straight jet-black hair, her face imbued with a sharp and somber authority by her cheekbones. Her daughter, Horreya, is asleep in her baby throne.

  “We’ve got to take all the different lists of the dead and the missing, combine them and see where the gaps are. We think that at least a thousand were killed. But there’s no accurate number for January twenty-eighth. And we don’t know how many are still missing. How many in jail. So first we have to make a master list.”

  Mariam sees a familiar grouping of four women she met doing square security through the long weeks of the July sit-in. Dalia works in a small factory and as long as she has a job her family won’t force her to marry; Rasha is a student in the faculty of arts, is drawing a comic in her notebook, and has badges of the martyrs pinned to her backpack; Fatma’s son was killed in a motorway crash so she says she’s here in his place; Lina is a doctor but gets claustrophobic whenever she tries to help in the field hospitals.

  At the back of the room is Verena, her dark hair falling down over her black clothes.

  Mariam’s phone vibrates in her pocket—

  Announcing free weekly clinic in Tahrir. Every Friday from now on. 10am–3pm. Please forward this message.

  “Then,” Ashira continues, “we have to map the master list. How many contacts do we have? We need to find a route to every single family of every single martyr. We need to visit them. We need to know their stories. Where they were born, what their job was, why they joined the revolution. What did they hope for Egypt, what did they wish their life would be? We need to sit with each family and listen until we have a story for each of the thousand people we’ve lost.”

  So many dead. So many still missing. Mariam glances at Verena and feels the thick air of the Coptic Hospital coiling again in her lungs and her throat.

  “Finally,” Ashira continues, her voice pitched with total control, “there will come the question of what more can we do for people. Are we going to talk to them about reparations? About their demands as martyrs’ families? Or are we an archival project? We have to decide this today, because when we talk to the families we have to be very clear about what we can and cannot do. Did I miss anything? No? Then I hand over to my colleagues to talk about the methodology.”

  We all take strength from one another, yes, but how many harvest theirs from Ashira? Ashira was four months pregnant when her husband was killed. January 28. “He went out that day,” she said once, “for all three of us.” Who could possibly show weakness or doubt in the face of her conviction? Mariam feels again the rising heat of the long nights with the dead and the cold of the chromium table and the sodden darkness of the city morgue and the hard skin of Umm Ayman’s hand in her own. Toussi, Ayman, Amirah, Khaled, Hadeer, Bassem, Mina. Streets of our cities will be renamed in your honor. Glory to the martyrs. Your names will be taught in history books. You have given what we have not yet been asked for.

  ASHIRA

  Ashira waits. She is always waiting. She can’t stop herself waiting, can’t switch it off, that part of her that’s always listening for the quiet click of metal, the vibration of a phone, a tread that pauses outside the door, the dream that doesn’t end on waking.

  She calls his phone sometimes. She holds her breath through the long seconds of silence, then collapses in exhausted tears at the voice of the machine.

  She goes to the morgue every Wednesday.

  He went out on January 28 for all three of us. He went out on January 28 for all three of us. She woke with a start. He was gone. No, he was in the shower. He came out, a towel around his waist, his body, his warmth filling their tony bedroom. She was so pregnant.

  “Is your phone working yet?” he asked. It wasn’t. Nobody’s was. Then he was on top of her, shaking his wet hair onto her and they were laughing and his hand was on her stomach and then his ear as he listened to the baby. “Baby?” he said. “Baby, can you hear me?”

  “We can’t keep calling it Baby, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “So let’s give her a name.”

  “Tomorrow. We’ll spend the morning in bed together and not get out until we have a name.”

  When he got up to get dressed a chill came over her.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said.

  “No,” he said, not smiling. “It’s not safe.”

  “That’s why I’m coming.”

  “No. I’m going for all three of us.”

  She checks the hospitals still. The police stations. They are all liars. They are all Mubarak loyalists. Maybe he’s alive. Alive and chained to a hospital bed or locked in a desert prison or alone in a coma.

  She doesn’t find him. She comes home.

  What does a year do to a body?

  He died gloriously. Sacrifices have to be made. Prices have to be paid.

  12

  December 12, 2011

  Stella is Khalil’s favorite Downtown joint. Wooden furniture decades old, ancient yellow and blue tablecloths, air ever thick with smoke. Saad has his seat by the door and Saad keeps the count; Saad likes the regulars who don’t cause trouble and shakes your hand and learns your name if you tip a bit and signals to Marwan, wire thin with slicked-back hair and eternal patience, who picks up a new table and carries it above his head and for all of six footsteps you’re in Goodfellas.

  “I got another busload of Italians today,” Hafez says.

  “What now?”

  “Fixing job. Cyberactivism and the revolution or something.”

  “A film?”

  “TV.”

  “Paid?”

  “Nope. They offered the spirit of camaraderie. Or was it comradeship?”

  “Hard currency.”

  “We’ll be parachute journalists one day,” Hafez says. “We’ll show up in Rome and demand free labor to tell the Roman side of the story!”

  Marwan places two beers on the table.

  “To bloody battles and bruised arms,” Hafez says. They clink bottles.

  Hafez’s head drops and he starts scribbling in his n
otebook. Khalil lights a cigarette and checks Twitter:

  @jona9898: What’s become of the army’s investigation into the “virginity tests” of female protesters. It’s been 8 months now.

  @Nadiaidan: Eleven months of SCAF rule now and still police are unreformed and unjailed. What is going on???

  Hafez is scribbling away in his notebook while Khalil smokes in silence. Marwan reaches up to switch on the radio and Umm Kulthum drifts into the room. Khalil listens while Hafez writes, the Lady’s voice filling him with a subtle excitement for the future, his next project: as soon as he has five minutes he’ll go through the albums one by one, a new way into the language, he’ll learn the songs, he’ll study the lyrics, he’ll teach himself to feel them.

  After a few minutes Hafez looks up, an epiphanic grin on his face as he polishes his glasses:

  “I got it!” he says. “It’s a movie! The twenty-eighth is a movie! It’s the only way to do it. You can’t write a thesis about it or a poem or a song or a book. It’s too big. It’s too cinematic. January twenty-eighth: it’s gotta be a movie. The whole country pours out, takes the streets, beats the pigs, burns down their police stations. It’s not about one hero, it’s not about feelings or interiority, it’s just too big. Nothing can do the twenty-eighth justice other than cinema.”

  “So you’re saying you want to set up a shoot featuring thousands of people waging a street war in five cities? You’d better call your old man.”

  Hafez prickles a little. His grandfather was a film director back when Egyptian films were legit, but Hafez’s father produces today’s schlock and his son holds him responsible for the whole industry’s downfall.

  “Oh, shut up. With a good script we’ll raise the money in no time. Just think about it. Cairo, Alexandria, Fayoum, Suez. Think of all the stories. The guys running into the burning party headquarters looking for evidence of disappeared family members, people breaking out of prison, the Brotherhood leaders escaping, the guys in Luxor who held a troop of cops under siege for days, burning down Sayyeda Zeinab police station, the police running out into the night in their underwear, SCAF’s meetings and plans, Gamal Mubarak freaking out as he’s watching TV. Shit, there’s just so many scenes!”

  “Sure. But how do you hold it together without a hero?”

  “Time. Or some theme ties each scene together. And in the end you have forty, fifty scenes that—taken all together—give you the picture.”

  Hafez orders another round and scribbles a little more in his book until Nancy walks in and takes the seat next to him. Nancy and Hafez are a nascent revolution couple. They met in the dark romance of Tahrir, smoking and watching the battle down Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Marwan comes over and asks if she wants a beer.

  “Yes. Thank you,” she says. Then, with a flourish of volume, adds, “We’d better all drink up while we still can, eh? You’ve seen what they’re doing, of course? You saw that video on Facebook we all saw? Buying votes! They’re out there buying votes! Brotherhood buses handing out bags of food. It’s disgusting! They should be disqualified!”

  Hafez, pen still in hand, looks up from his notes. “It’s not totally clean but anyone can take a bit of initiative and go hand out food.”

  “Yes, but we’re not!”

  “And that’s the Brotherhood’s fault?”

  “They’re the ones pushing this criminal timetable through. They’ve had decades to prepare. Who can compete with that?”

  “Who do you mean by we?”

  “You know very well, Hafez, who I mean by we. Liberals, secularists, whatever—whoever’s not going to segregate the beaches and pour all the alcohol out into the Nile.”

  “But it’s not the Brotherhood setting the timetable,” Khalil says. “It’s the army.” He points at the newspaper headline on the table.

  SCAF SPOKESMAN CONFIRMS TIMELINE FOR TRANSITION OF POWER

  By June 30 we will have an elected president and the army will have only one role to perform, which is to protect the country. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces does not seek continued authority, and we will not interfere in political life.

  “The army is stuck,” Nancy says. “They made a promise to the nation and they have to stick to it.”

  Mariam walks in, and Khalil can feel every man in the bar watching as she kisses him on the cheek, as her hand finds his knee for a moment.

  At the table in the far corner Khalil can hear Malik talking at top volume. “We are crisis! We thrive on crisis! Our fucking job is to create crisis! Without the crisis there’s only the fucking regime or the system or whatever the fuck you wanna call it. Without the crisis everything just stays the fucking same!”

  The One is sitting opposite him, a minefield of empty green bottles and overflowing ashtrays and cigarette packs and cell phones and plates of cheese and tomatoes and chickpeas between them.

  “And what,” Hafez calls out across the bar, “what if what’s coming next is worse? You can’t have crisis forever. People are getting tired of this.”

  “People can’t expect a revolution to be tidily wrapped up in ten months. These things take years.”

  “Well, then people have to be convinced that it’s worth years. They have to make that choice. We have to show that there’s a plan. They need concrete ideas.”

  “And what exactly, dear Hafez, is a concrete idea? You can’t design an anarchist utopia, that’s the whole point. You can only have principles. It’s all about principles. They’re all out there banging on about democracy but you and I can agree that it’s not democracy that they’re talking about. Elections are a billion-dollar distraction. Actual democracy is everyone having an equal stake. So we can only get to the principles—and then you build from there.”

  “This is all well and good,” Hafez says. “But you’ve still got to give people something to hold on to. Why’s revolution better than not-revolution? If you can’t answer that in a sentence, you’re losing people every day.”

  “Everything’s encapsulated in one chant: bread, freedom, social justice.”

  “People don’t want to hear a poem. They want a plan.”

  “Do they? Or do they just want to be told that everything’s going to be all right? The fact is, it’s a fight among five percent of the population because there’s only five percent willing to actually fight. Everyone else’ll just fall in behind the winner.”

  “You’ve just summed up everything that the revolution isn’t,” Hafez says.

  “The revolution is a story told to get people on your side. But in the end, most people stay home.”

  “And what”—everyone turns their heads; the One rarely speaks—“what if one side is paid and the other side not? Or when your half of the five percent gets bored and wants to stop playing revolution and get on with their lives? Or when your half splits?”

  No one leaps to respond. Hafez lights his cigarette. Malik is too polite to say it, but Khalil knows what he’s thinking, he feels it, too: our days of listening to drunk old Europeans lecture us about democracy are over.

  “So who are you voting for?” the One continues.

  “I’m voting for Hamdeen,” Nancy says, and Khalil can feel Mariam’s eyes rolling next to him.

  “Everyone else is boycotting,” Mariam says.

  The One nods sagely.

  “I’m undecided,” Khalil says.

  “You’re not serious?” Mariam says.

  He’s been thinking about it constantly. The Brotherhood wants elections. The army wants elections. America wants elections. So surely we shouldn’t? Elections are the death of politics. The ballot box exists to quell the revolution. Democracy is always for sale to the highest bidder. We want another way, a way as yet unknown. Khalil can hear the words, can see the argument. The young do all the dying and the old go to the polls to vote for other old fucks to tell the young what to do. It’s clear. Just say no. But he can’t stop thinking, what comes after saying no?

  “How else do you take power?” he says.


  “But it’s a sham. How can we vote when the army controls the voting districts and the polling stations, when the Brotherhood is handing out free food across the country? It’s all theater and voting legitimizes it.”