The City Always Wins Read online

  “It’s already legitimate,” Khalil says. “People want it, and the boycott won’t stop it happening.”

  “But it’s all theater!” Mariam repeats. “It’s already decided what’s going to happen. The army and the Brotherhood have agreed. So having a high turnout only helps them.”

  “But if you don’t ever engage in elections, how do you come to power?”

  “I don’t want to come to power! Do you? Do you want to be a politician? We’re the opposition, we’re the disruption, we’re what’s going to keep power in line.”

  “We’re crisis!” Malik shouts.

  Mariam nods approvingly. “I don’t want power. I want to trust the street. Something new is coming that we can’t see yet. And we have to keep the crisis alive long enough for it to happen.”

  “Whatever’s coming next,” Khalil says, “I think you still have to try and take power.”

  A silence falls between them.

  After a moment, Hafez steps into the breach: “I’ve been reading a book about the independence movements in Africa, decolonization. And in pretty much every single case it goes the same way: The revolution arrives, it seems glorious and popular and invincible, something goes a little off course so the army stages a coup, people are massacred and jailed, then another general overturns the last one with promises of democracy and so on. And on and on it goes. Every single time.”

  “Won’t happen here,” Malik says, with instant confidence. “It’s different now. Mobile phones and the internet, mate. You need more than just an army to control people. The whole world’s fucked off and everyone’s talking about it. The idea is too strong. And you can’t kill everyone.”

  13

  The bats went home. Alone in the dark of the studio, he often thinks of that night, its infinite silence, the bats looping through the dark air above the river, the tank sitting in stillness in a pool of yellow light, the wide, empty street, the night’s hunters gliding silently between the great riverbank trees, ecstatic in this, the first silence in generations. How did they know to go back there? Had they been waiting, watching, hoping we would finally extinguish ourselves and our incessant noise?

  Above the desk is Mariam’s poster. VISIT PALESTINE. Her first addition to the apartment those months ago. The dark tree framing the promised land in the art deco distance, the Dome of the Rock triumphant at the heart of the eternal city. It used to be easy. A train from Cairo to Jerusalem. One land, one people from Casablanca to Baghdad. No, not one people. One language. What better basis for cooperation can there be? The United States of Arabia. Is that what we want? Nothing short of that would be strong enough to change the world order. And then what? Then we have borders keeping out everyone else? No. The United States of Arabia will not be enough.

  He clicks back to the recording of the bats, to the simplest, most glorious nights. The city waiting silently, the people united, the crumbling dictatorship, the bats set free. He can hear the trees hanging heavy over the Nile. No one else is there. Just Khalil and the bats. We could all breathe again. He reached his hand out over the railing, strained out over the black river. Look at the new world, the unthinkable happening around us. This is your doing, Bouazizi. There is no one else. Did you doubt yourself, for a moment? Were you scared when you lit the match? This is all for you. Everything, now, is for you.

  14

  December 19, 2011

  A stone river of blood drags through the asphalt of Tahrir. On its banks the mourners. The stain of a life slipping away. He walks silently along it. The square is empty now, dark and cold. This new battle has been long. Khalil follows the bloodline, follows the careful stones lining this new holiness. This must be where the bleeding began, the dark heat in the center of the square. They attacked in the afternoon, bullets racing ahead of men in body armor. This must be where he fell. He sees the men heaving a young body between them, sees clothes heavy with blood, the police giving chase. The death leads north. The square is silent now. They will attack again soon.

  Khalil sits down carefully on the ground next to a woman in a doctor’s coat. All along the bloodline are men, women, young boys sitting cross-legged on the banks with heads in hands and tears in eyes.

  “Who was this?” he asks quietly, without looking at her.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Did he survive?” Khalil asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  How many people are carrying him? Does he know what’s happening? All we know is he’s bleeding fast. That blood dries thick. They know about blood work. The bloodline stretches on. It takes so much to keep us alive.

  The report of a shotgun echoes through the square.

  They are coming.

  Hundreds of police are sprinting across the square. Everyone is running. He is slow to react, he is somehow the last, and when he does the attack truck is already upon him, its headlights blinding down on him, and he hears a shotgun and he’s running and he stumbles as an arc of light cuts across him and a siren screams and white light floods through his body as a lashing of fire cuts across his back and he stumbles and falls and in a moment is everything, is a dozen final conversations in a heartbeat, is all the things he should have done differently as he aches for his mother, watching him die, a death in the family, a crowbar and a laughter, a wheelchair and ramps and a new life on wheels and weak arms now alone in a dark apartment without Mariam, alone in a sea of a thousand mourning posters, the breath in her chest as she allows herself to cry, as she feels the break inside her. Will you remember me? Will my name take its place among our fallen constellations? Do I take comfort from it, do I relax now, let go? I have stood and I have fallen. You would be proud of me. You’ll all be proud of me. Mother. The night is so long. Unmoving forever next to each other in the dark. Have you been here long, Mom? You saw me, we could have been together, let me show you around, but stick together—it’s better to be in pairs. You know that. I’ll show you around just stay with me and we can talk and you can tell me some things. I was too young, you know I was too young to know about burials. We would have been together. We should have brought you here. We would lie together, all together still bodies wrapped in linen and laid out in the darkness for an untouching eternity, you and your boy. But what if forever is spent in desperate loneliness, lying together in the family tomb, next to each other but untouching, a shadow of yearning through the dark unmovable night of nights? What if every second of every minute of every night of our eternity of death I want nothing more than for you to reach over and touch my arm? You have to tell me and tell me now because my father will be getting on a plane soon and he doesn’t even have Mariam’s phone number so who’s going to meet him, how will he find his way to the morgue?

  15

  December 21, 2011

  The light in the apartment is off. When Mariam comes into the bedroom he doesn’t move. Khalil is lying on his side. Dark bloodstains rorschach across his bandaged back. She walks around the bed. He is awake, his eyes are bloodshot. So are everyone’s. The gas makes you sick. She kisses him gently on the lips.

  “How you doing, darling?”

  He gives half a nod through the opioid fog.

  “We should change your bandages.”

  “They’re okay,” he says. “Tomorrow.”

  She sits on the bed next to him and gently strokes his hair. He can feel her phone vibrating. She ignores it.

  “I called your father,” she says.

  He tries to answer but he needs to sleep. Is he coming? Am I going home? Home? Home?

  Her phone vibrates again and he feels her move and then she’s leaning over him and kissing him on the cheek.

  “I have to go,” she says. “I won’t be long. Sheikh Emad’s widow is giving a statement about his autopsy. She’s going to say it was an army bullet that killed him.”

  “Okay,” Khalil mutters.

  “I won’t be long.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She kneels down next to him, kisses
him again. “I won’t be long.”

  “Mariam,” he says, and she pauses at the door. He tries to tell her to take a microphone, tries to tell her to record something but he can’t remember what he was trying to say and his arm is so heavy hanging pointlessly in the air so he puts it down slowly again and just lifts a finger to say goodbye before closing his eyes again and he can hear her phone ringing outside and maybe it’s my father calling her, maybe they talk all the time, yes, she says, your son is in a military prison, yes I understand, she says, what does she understand, it’s so hot in here under this sheet, so hot in my home, new home, cold home, home, home please stand for our brave servicemen and -women, and stand, maybe you’ll never stand again maybe their steel will dig into you and gnaw away your spinal cord and you’ll never be able to enlist, because you would enlist, wouldn’t you, Kaleel? if your country called on you you’re a good kid Kal I know you, I know your father, if your country called you’d answer, right? Right? Turn left to exit, press escape to escape, press now, press on, pray tell did you read that Nick Kristof book it was a present from a colleague’s daughter I told you all about her I’m dying for you to meet her and dialogue because you moderate Muslims are the ones who should be speaking out don’t you think don’t you think about pork, there’s no escape, because let’s face facts the Buddhists aren’t out blowing themselves up so come meet her, she’s good people, her parents are part of the peace movement in Tel Aviv but oh, my, gosh, you’ll never be free, look at that beard, Kaleel, you’re not going fundy on us are you darling because I know we can agree that we’ve just got to get Bin Laden and the very strangest thing is, every Muslim I’ve ever met loves pork and I summered in Israel once and it just has to start with dialogue but it was a beautiful country so funny all your virgins in suicide paradise but you wouldn’t want your sister wearing a veil praying five times a day and not even having a sip of water through all that month of Ramadan checking Facebook, is it all about Facebook, do the Arabs want freedom because they saw that we have it on Facebook?

  16

  December 24, 2011

  He hadn’t spoken to his father for weeks, months maybe, but he’s called every day since Mariam told him.

  “Will you be careful now?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You were shot. I have to worry.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “And Mariam?”

  “Mariam, too.”

  “What are you doing, Khalil? You’re going to get yourself killed. What can you possibly do in the face of this?”

  “You’ve been asking that since day one,” Khalil says, impatient.

  “Look around you. You’ve no guns, no bombs. Be realistic.”

  “Let’s not say those words on the phone.”

  “This is a new game now, son.”

  “And you know all about the game, right?”

  “You think it’s only you who knows anything?” He’s silent for a moment. “You think that you and your friends are the only ones to have stood up? There have been hundreds of generations.”

  “I didn’t mean…,” Khalil says. “I’m sorry.”

  Khalil’s father waits in the silence of the wounded, then says: “There’s a reason you were born in America, you know.”

  17

  January 2, 2012

  He uses Hafez’s grandfather’s cane on their walks. Every day Hafez rings his doorbell at eleven. At first Khalil’s legs would shake and the pain would overcome him. But now, with the cane in his right hand and his left in Hafez’s arm, he manages. The anniversary of the revolution is upon them. By January 25 he must be able to march. By January 25 he must be able to run.

  “Come on, Rambo,” Hafez says, as they tread carefully along the unpredictable sidewalk toward Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Cairo is alive, as always, with its sounds immeasurable. The coded language of car horns communicating endlessly in animal impulses of greeting and warning; the chorus of birds that fills the dusk air in Zamalek with chatterings before sleep; the echoing of the pleasure boats under the Abd al-Moneim Riad overpass; conversations private and public all shouted for the world to hear; the polyphony of grizzled adhans puncturing the predawn silence, announcing it is finally and unquestioningly time to leave the twenty-four-hour bar at the Odeon Hotel and go home to bed. And then the army’s wall, and silence as it severs Mohamed Mahmoud Street, the graffiti covering its cement blocks a chorus of demands. WANTED, it threatens in a frontier font—

  LIEUTENANT MAHMOUD SOBHI EL-SHENAWY, A CENTRAL SECURITY FORCES OFFICER ACCUSED OF SHOOTING DOZENS OF FREE REVOLUTIONISTS’ EYES OUT.

  On other blocks are freehand scrawls desecrating the military and exalting the martyrs and stencils of a blue bra:

  NO TO STRIPPING OF PEOPLE.

  NO TO VIRGINITY TESTS.

  “I quit,” Hafez says.

  “Quit what?”

  “The PhD. I can’t go back to London now. Not with all this.”

  “Good.”

  “There’s no point. The images are all here.” Hafez half gestures out to the desolate, divided street. “You just need to be in the right place at the right time.”

  Khalil’s mind flicks to the famous video of Toussi; the young body, broken by the police, is dragged into the garbage piled up on the corner of Tahrir Square. His name, we know now, is Toussi. Toussi. So alone in his last moment that pulled so many out to the streets for his vengeance.

  “Remind me your title?” Khalil says.

  “Don’t bully me.”

  “Come on.”

  “The Politics of Tracking Shots in American and Cuban Cinematic Political Self-Representation of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies.”

  The laughter hurts Khalil’s back.

  The wind blows a newspaper up against the wall. Again and again the paper rises and slaps itself against the cement blocks and falls again.

  HAMAS INFILTRATORS UNCOVERED WITH CACHE OF WEAPONS AT CABINET CLASHES.

  “Hey girl, nice hair!” someone behind them shouts, and they turn to see Mariam walking toward them, a teenage boy cycling quickly away with a glance over his shoulder. She doesn’t look at him. She comes and stands next to them. She is looking at the stencil of the blue bra, seeing the jackboot smashing down on the young woman’s chest.

  If you look at the picture you’ll see it’s not actually a boot. He’s wearing running shoes. Which is proof that these men were infiltrators. Sent to discredit the army.

  He has to get back to work. It’s been two weeks since the last podcast. He must start collecting material. The radio commentariat sicken him. The Facebook warriors. The sycophants working through the night to poison people’s minds.

  Why was she wearing this sultry blue bra? Where did she think she was? And she’s clearly not wearing anything else under there, so what’s really going on here?

  “Oh, fucking hell,” Hafez says, his phone in his hand. “Guys, you’re not going to be happy about this.”

  “What is it?” Mariam says.

  “The people, apparently, have spoken.”

  Hafez’s face freezes in seriousness.

  “Well, come on then,” Mariam says.

  “Honestly, you’re not going to be happy,” Hafez says.

  “Seriously, what is it?”

  “People magazine named Bradley Cooper the sexiest man alive.”

  “Oh Christ, Hafez, you had me fucking nervous.”

  At the end of the street a small crowd is gathering. A young man on a ladder is painting the final touches on a mural. In the crowd, Abu Bassem is watching the colors climbing together to draw his son’s face, the black contours of his eyes bold and forward-looking. They embrace in silence and wait for the artist to finish. All around Bassem’s portrait are sketches of pharaonic figures stretched to modern brushstrokes imparting timeless lessons for good governance. This, he thinks, is Egypt. The new, here, does not destroy the old but carries it with it, builds on it, talks to it. The connections, the foundations, ar
e stronger. It’s what you do with the old—that is what’s new. We are New York in the twenties, the music and the modern driving forward together, forging the future with brass and steel but keeping our histories alive with us, keeping our fallen living among us. The mural complete, Abu Bassem steps carefully forward. He runs his finger over the careful black outline, alone, for a moment, with his son.

  ABU BASSEM

  He’s walked through it a dozen times. The clap, the crack, the fall, the blood. The last breath. The phone call. The word was Bassem but the voice wasn’t. Too late to the hospital. Bassem’s friends in the gray corridor, faces dark and downturned. There was no doctor. He just picked up his son and walked.

  At least he had his body. At least he could say goodbye. At least we’ll lie together through the next darkness.

  He had the body—and now he has a name. Captain Mokhtar Ibrahim, Imbaba police station. He finds himself pacing the long sidewalk opposite the station, running his hand through the sharp brush shading the houseboats beneath, the relentless traffic a hot barrier between him and the squat concrete across the freeway. They are afraid. They do not come out alone. They wear their weapons heavy. He watches every move, counts the breaths filling Mokhtar’s fat paunch, runs the words he’ll speak through the bars of the courtroom cell as his son’s killer is dragged away to justice. In darker, weaker moments he sees other things, a sweating brow under a single lamp, an open hand landing on a terrified face, a knife forged for small cuts. But he shakes them from his mind. That is not the justice Bassem died for, that is not the new world he went looking for on the twenty-eighth. We must be patient. The orders are for patience.

  “We will avenge your son” is the message. “But we must play the game, we must take power, we must create a smooth and orderly path to the elections and we must win those elections. If a police station were to burn to the ground tonight, could there possibly be elections tomorrow? Of course not. So we must be patient, trust our leaders, they will lead us all to justice.”