(4) Archive -The Book as a Whole

All chapters of the book posted so far are available below for reader reference. Chapters 1-14 are currently listed: 

 

Act 1-Om el Dounia- The Mother of the World

 

February 11th 2011

 

 

 

In the time of Moses and Ramses, there was an old man who had spent all of his life walking along the Nile.

One day, a young boy approached him.

“Uncle,”

The boy said respectfully:

“Why have you walked so long beside the river, heading north and south along its banks?”

The old man answered:

“I am searching for my mother, who was lost to me long ago. Until I find her I will never stop wandering.”

The boy felt sorry.

“Don’t waste yourself, Uncle.”

He said:

“Pharaoh is our father.”

The old man replied. 

 

“Then why did he sell my mother?”

١ (One) ١

Asher had always found waiting gates at airports to be very vapid places. Yet for all the empty seats he had immediately around his row as he sat for his flight to board, it was impossible for him to achieve the solitude he so craved. Asher often thought of himself as the sort of person who could only be himself when he was alone.

As an undergrad, when he was asked in his Introduction to Writing Fiction class to describe the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, Asher’s response was simple; an empty room. He lived off of those special moments when he could reach through the clairvoyant void of inner and outer silence and touch his thoughts. Yet he had never found them when flying. It seemed to him that airports the world over had a habit of coating the mind in a layer of discomfort and draining all motivation the second you walked up to the check in counter. Beyond his row, fellow passengers of every color and creed waited dispassionately on small plastic seats, trying their hardest to ignore the other uncomfortable strangers tuning out the world on their mp3 players, iphones and, occasionally a laptop. Every attempt Asher made at dreaming was swamped by this awkwardness and the foreknowledge of the cramped and freezing quarters that were waiting inside the steel fuselage. It also didn’t help that TSA and Homeland Security Officers were constantly marching up and down the halls, hell-bent on patrolling their carpeted kingdom while their potbellies jiggled up and down. In short, an airport was no place to find the thing Asher longed for the most, authentic emptiness. Everyone else he knew searched for ways to fill any void that appeared in their lives. Asher’s animus was to explore that void and see how deep it went. It was a quest that had driven him far from his family in the mid-west to a city of twenty million people, a human swamp that engulfed the river Nile. 

            Al-Qahira, Cairo, the recently purged heart of an utterly transformed country was awaiting him. So was his old job, his old flat, his friends, and a sharp cocktail of bittersweet memories.Two weeks after he had chosen to evacuate, Asher knew he was returning to a country he might not recognize, a country morphing into a place that could be a far cry from the place he had called home for nearly eight months before the protests started.

          Yet he was deeply excited. A vacuum of immeasurable proportions had opened across Egypt. After 18 days of protests, street fighting, and a slew of too-little, too-late pledges for change and reform from the authorities, Hosni Mubarak had resigned, leaving a council of generals to oversee the country's transition to a new government. The sight of the cheering thousands crammed into Tahrir Square on February 11^th, the night of the resignation, told Asher the new vacuum would be filled soon enough. Before it did, Asher hoped he could catch a glimpse of the new horizons that had opened up.

He wasn't scared of the Ikwhen or the ‘Moslem radicals'. He never listened to the Glenn Becks and Bill O Reillys of America who clung to their mikes like infants suckling on the fantasies and insecurities of their listeners. What frightened Asher the most was the prospect of the past and that it might be waiting for him at the periphery of the void.

It was strange to think he had already tasted regret in Egypt after only eight months.

As boarding time approached and the Turkish Airlines agent at the front desk called once again for passenger Mehmet Pamuk, Asher removed his Egyptian mobile from his carry on. He switched it on and opened his SMS inbox. For the final time that night he read the last message he had received on February 1^st, the last day he had been in Egypt.

Sender: Kareem
+20101764020
Feb. 1 2011
Message:

Goodbye man! I wish I could come with you ;_-)

٢ (Two) ٢

Had he stayed on 'American' time, Asher O Brian might have arrived in Cairo on February 17^th at 9:30 pm, just as the boarding passes he picked up in Chicago had indicated. Instead, his connecting Egypt Air flight in Istanbul was canceled while he was on his way. Asher was sure this had happened as the plane had crossed over into Turkish airspace. As upset as he was when the man behind the Turkish Airlines service desk told him he would have to wait five more hours for another flight, the delay brought a slim, weary smile to Asher’s face. It was very appropriate that his return to the Middle East should be greeted with a delay and a cancellation. He needed to get used to Cairo time again.

Certain he would be able to sleep any of Ataturk International’s gates or overflowing cafes, Asher took a seat at the Starbucks near the screening area. Alhamdulillah, the couch he had sat at while waiting for his flight to the States two weeks earlier was unoccupied. Ignoring the tiny invisible fingers drawing circles on the backs of his eyes, Asher bought a dark mocha and pushed his way through several chapters of The Yacoubian Building. It was, as one of his British friends in Cairo had put it, requisite material for any ex-pat in Egypt and he read it continually for he next several hours, apart from a short chat t he had with a group of Bosnian boy scouts coming back from an umrah pilgrimage to Mecca.

His time with Alaa Al Aswany ended at 12:30 when boarding for his next Egypt Air flight finally got under way. Over two hours later, he, fifteen Egyptians, eight Mongolians one Frenchman and one Cypriot (Asher had counted the number of passports he saw at the check in counter), along with others whose nationality remained a mystery touched down in Cairo. After clearing passport control and purchasing his visa, Asher emerged from baggage claim and strolled out of the terminal.

By then it was three o’clock in the morning, well passed the curfew the military council had put in place after assuming power. Asher wasn't surprised at all that there were still at least a dozen taxi drivers vying for a fare outside the Terminal despite the edict. Requests and offers in broken English swamped Asher’s ears as he groggily accepted one from a goateed basha in a brown leather jacket. The price for the ride was steep, eighty Egyptian pounds, but by that point Asher would have been fine paying two hundred. His body felt utterly unwound. His clothes stuck to his body now as if freeze-dried to his skin.

His mind wasn’t in a polished state either. As they tried to leave the parking lot at Terminal 3 , Asher had to fumble around in his wallet for several minutes as he tried to remember which color the ten pound note was to pay the parking attendant at the gate. Finally, the driver paid from his own wallet and drove out. As they plowed through a swarm of plastic bags waltzing about the deserted streets, Asher’s head was still clear enough for him to notice the closed shops and empty sidewalks, so uncharacteristic of the hive of 24/7 activity that defined the Cairo life he had known.

As they sped through the upper class suburb of Heliopolis, Asher knew this was not a complete emptiness. Scattered beggars were still to be found under trees and lampposts, and odd groups of young men in jackets and tight jeans still strode about sidewalks and alleyways weaving in and out of the spaces between the dozens of rectangular shaped apartment buildings and walled army related compounds that were so common in the area. A few odd cars sped past them as they drove down the wide avenues. Normally chocked with traffic at any given hour, the only obstacles slowing drivers down on the asphalt rivers were the army checkpoints, manned by at least five soldiers with an imposing looking armored vehicle for show. Asher had watched enough action films to tell the difference between the Russian and American models.

The soldiers at each stop were amiable, and the driver’s curfew pass was enough to stop them from asking ridiculous questions. Still, the trip was slow going. Asher guessed that without traffic the drive from the airport to his home in Dokki would have taken forty five minutes. Since the checkpoints were up and the main roads and bridges that were cut off, it took two hours before they could get across Qasr el Nil Bridge. When the driver pulled up in front of his building on Rashdan Street, double parking alongside the BMW of the pediatrician who lived two floors down from him, Asher’s consciousness was running on fumes.

He handed the basha a hundred and told him to keep the change. The car sped off onto a deserted Dokki street, leaving Asher at the steps leading up to his building. The corner stand where he bought his soft drinks and water was locked up for the night. The lights in the building of the courier company across from his flat were switched off, leaving only a few scattered street lamps to bleach the darkness orange. Asher basked in the desertion. The absence of Cairo’s chorus of automobiles, allowed him to hear the trees planted in the sidewalks as they blew in the wind. All around him the tall buildings stood silent like a concrete forest that failed to sway in the breeze.

However, the silence didn’t last. As soon as the wind died down, a single muezzin’s groggy voice ignited the air with the dawn prayer. He was soon joined by others in mosques all across Dokki, their calls rippling across the whole of the city. Asher sighed, and walked up to the entrance of his building. He knew the chaos and deluge of noise was about return.

The doors were bolted shut, as they usually were after two o’clock. Asher looked behind the corner counter where the doormen sat during the day. There he found Ismail sleeping on his prayer rug. A kitchen knife lay on the ground near the hand. It was the same one he had carried on the 28^th and 29^th when the police had disappeared and the looters and rumors had driven people to form vigilante groups. Asher, suddenly found it strange how he hadn’t noticed how different the streets looked now that the roadblocks and stick wielding watchmen were gone. The neighborhood watches had been some of the last people he had encountered before he left.

Throwing his usually polite and timid nature aside, Asher shook Ismail from his slumber. The doorman's eyes widened as he stirred. He adjusted his cotton sweater as he flashed Asher his toothless grin.

“Mista, Ash.” He said, shaking off the night chill as he rose. “Amal eh?”

“Fine,” Ash answered in Arabic. “And you?”

“Alhamdulillah, Mista Peter came back last week; the same day Hosni stepped down.”

Asher loved how Ismail grinned as he mentioned the fall of the former President. Like a fair number of older Egyptians had been wary of the protests when they first started. It was also the first time he had ever him refer to Hosni Mubarak anything other the President.

“I know. “ Asher said. “He emailed me. His classes will start again on Sunday. Could you let me in the door, basha?”

“Of course, sir.”

They chatted a little more as Ismail searched for the right key on his tiny. The age lines on his forehead drew tight as he squinted in the dark.

“How is your family?” Asher wondered; he was suddenly very aware in that moment how he would have to ask that question to every Egyptian he knew when he saw them again.

“Great, great.” Ismail said. “My son was married in Tahrir Square.”

“Congratulations! Lord bless them.”

Ismail smiled awkwardly and shrugged as he found the correct key.

“It’s the new Egypt, a new day for us all.”

Asher nodded as Ismail unlocked the door and pulled it open by its metal rim. He could tell Ismail had been disappointed by his son’s decision to elope, though he conveyed none of this feeling in his voice. As one of his younger Egyptian friends had told him once, weddings in Egypt tended to be more about the family’s prestige than about the couple themselves. A good wedding party could make or break a reputation. Still, he knew Ismail wasn’t the type to hold a grudge. He was sure, deep down, that he was happy for his son. Not a lot of young men could afford the financial or professional requirements a girl's family usually demanded to approve a marriage.

Asher told Ismail goodnight after the door had been opened and walked through the lobby. He passed by the overstuffed post boxes hanging on the wall and entered the odd floored elevator. He rode up to the eleventh floor, tapping his finger against the doors. When he reached his floor, the top one, he stepped out and opened the door to his flat. A former psychologist’s office, the apartment’s long halls led into a lounge and dining room that took up two thirds of the flat.

The King Louis style chandeliers, presided over an assortment of Victorian lounge chairs (so typical of the furniture in many Egyptian apartments and homes) and a chic sofa that was oddly out of place. Placing his backpack on the counter, next to a gilded framed calligraphy etching of the the opening verse of the Qur'an, Asher flipped on the switch behind the refrigerator. The white lights on the chandelier above the dining table doused the room like a pearl mist, even as the yellow ones remained dark. The bulbs worked; it was just that the wiring only carried the current from certain switches to certain bulbs.

Asher took a seat on the ebony couch and breathed in his flat. After lying splayed for several minutes he stood up and walked to the bathroom. He passed by his flatmate’s room without a pause, assuming he was fast asleep, and after washing his face and hair reentered the dining room to. He picked up his travel bag and had every intention of heading straight to his room and slipping off into a much needed coma. Yet when he turned around Asher’s strained eyes were snagged by something on the table. It was a piece of orange paper, folded in the middle and standing upright like a tent.

Thinking it was some note from his flatmate, Asher picked up the paper and revealing a small black and white USB drive. Asher studied the plastic stick for a few moments before looking at the paper. A message had been written in English on the concealed side. Asher immediately recognized Peter’s eloquent script.

Hi Ash,

Since your flight was probably delayed, I’ll just jog off to bed now and trust that Ismail will let you in. I’m going out for an early morning meeting between my school administrators and the rest of the faculty tomorrow. They’re probably cutting our budget to save money after the Revolution so I think it’ll be a long one. I’m going to spend the night at Monica’s to recuperate.

Anyway, since I’m not likely to see you until Saturday, I wanted to let you know that a kid came by the flat yesterday looking for you. I can’t remember his name, sorry, but I know he was a relative of Kareem’s. He gave me this stick and told me to let you know that he wanted you to have it. He also said you’re invited to the funeral tomorrow if you feel up to it. The wake will start at four at their house.

That’s all. Also, I paid Ismail his fees for last month so I’ll collect your share next time I see you. Sorry about your friend mate; take care.

Peter 
 

            Asher pressed his hands together, as if in prayer, and closed the note. He quickly folded it and put it in his pants pocket. Weakened by his jetlag and jarred by the unexpected hit Peter's concluding line had delivered to his core, tears began to gather on the edge of his lids. He wiped them away with his fingers and attempted swallow his grief with a few hefty breathes. He tried to tell himself he had cried enough when he’d first read the news about Kareem last Friday just as he had been celebrating the news of Mubarak's resignation.

          Struggling against the sudden surge grief, Asher tried to escape to his bed. He stripped, lay down and closed his eyes, attempting to empty his head. At one point, when it seemed he was about to break into another fit of sobbing, he reached into bag and pulled out his mobile. He went through his alphabetized contact list. He went straight to the Ds, stopping on Dina. Asher stared at the name, circling the last letter with his thumb slowly like a gear in a rusted machine.

         Then, as abruptly as he had pulled out the phone, Asher pressed down on the off button and switched it off. He collapsed back onto his bedspread and closed his eyes. The call to prayer was over now and he listened to the queer silence of Cairo caught between curfew and the new dawn until he finally shut himself off.

Al MASRY AL YOUM

Remains of Human Rights Activist Confiscated by Military

English Edition

Sat, 12/02/2011 - 23:22

The district military court of Cairo has announced that it will be holding the remains of a missing human rights activist for one week to help facilitate its investigation.

The charred remains of Kareem Abdel Aziz el Shatr were discovered early Friday morning by an army unit just off of Mohamed Mahmud Street, shortly after the resignation of former President Hosni Mubarak. According to army spokesman, Cpt. Sa’id Salawy, El Shatr was identified by his state issued ID card, which had survived the burning.    A prominent activist in the April 6^th movement who had also worked as a blogger and an engineer for Ezz Steel, el Shatr disappeared on the night of February 1^st shortly after leaving Tahrir Square at around midnight. His family, along with several activists, had spread awareness about his disappearance using social networking sites. No party has been named responsible for the death. However, State Security agents or vigilantes attached to the regime of former President Mubarak are widely believed to have had involvement in el Shatr’s disappearance and death.

“Mubarak’s fall was only the first step in a long process,” Said, April 6^th member, Kamal Yusef when asked about el Shatr’s discovery. “We are delighted that he has opted to spare his country further turmoil by resigning but we demand that the Armed Forces investigate the fate of Kareem as well as all the disappearances and deaths of all our brothers and sisters in the Revolution.”

Speaking on behalf of the family, Kareem’s mother Amira, a widow of ten years, said that they will continue to investigate her son’s death until the perpetrators are brought to justice.

“Kareem and his generation will be remembered for their sacrifice and their victory.” She told reporters outside her home in Imbabah. “God willing, his blood will give birth to a new nation.”

The funeral will be held next week on Friday pending the military’s release of the body. The army says it intends to keep the remains until the exact hour of their initial discovery, 5:23 am.

Translated from the Arabic Edition

٣  (Three) ٣

            The funeral of Kareem Abdel Aziz El Shatr, took place a week to the day after Hosni Mubarak resigned the Presidency. As the young man’s family prepared to lay him to rest, thousands of their countrymen streamed into the now world famous Tahrir Square to commemorate their victory, united by the spirit that had ended the regime and life they had known for thirty years. Yet on the other side of the river, in a narrow, unnamed side street in the working class neighborhood of Imbabah a second crowd was also gathering to commemorate the end of another legacy.
            Stirring himself from his achy slumber at 2:30 in the afternoon, Asher struggled to shrug off the jetlag from his protracted journey. He showered, drained two cups of Nescafe and began the sloth-like process of getting dressed for the wake. For most of his life, Asher had loathed dress clothes. He had always worn them for others, not for himself. He only felt scrutinized and counterfeit when he put on a dress shirt, never empowered. This time, however, he welcomed the garments onto his body. Today, he wanted to hide himself and the feelings that were bubbling inside him. It was just like putting on armor, he told himself as he combed out his hair, or the mud bath a hippo used to keep flies off.

            When he was fully disguised, Asher left his flat and went down to the front of his building. He waved to Ismail as he shifted through the pages of a newspaper and turned out onto Dokki Street. Opting for a white and black metered cab, Asher told the driver to drop him off at Imbabah Street going along the Corniche. The driver, a young man with lemon color teeth and slicked back hair like so many other shebab, smiled in surprise.

          “Imbabah?” He said. “You want to go Imbabah?”

          “Bizupt.” Asher replied, switching to Arabic as he usually did with taxi drivers, vendors and shopkeepers. “Don’t worry; I know people there.”  

          The shebab nodded and drove on, passing by a pair of men in cartoonish, red and black top hats selling Egyptian flags. Asher saw even more peddlers trying to sell Revolution themed memorabilia as the cab passed through Dokki Square and turned onto Tahrir Street. A few shops were open, but like any Friday afternoon the noon prayer had cleared the streets. A few veiled women totted their children down the sidewalks.

Soon the taxi drove around the roundabout in front of the Dokki Sheraton. Asher stared at the vehicles alongside them as they began to approach the traffic light near the Corniche. The cars of Cairo were as diverse in their shape and make as the people inside them. A half a dozen men and women sat in a dented microbus, while an unveiled woman in a chic blouse and designer jeans chatted casually with a man in a suit in a slick new BMW. A capped man with a beard and zabiba, a prayer callous on his forehead, slid between them on a Suzuki motorcycle, blasting Lebanese pop from a pair of concealed speakers. He popped up next to a flatbed Toyota where two mustachioed Upper Egyptian men (Sai’dis) in galibayas and turbans sat perched on top of some sacks of rice. Asher had missed this diversity, and had he wanted to he probably could have forgotten about the Revolution that had swept the country.

This thought was quickly swept aside. The car was stopped before they could reach Corniche by a policeman trying to change the flow of traffic. The sight of the thick black winter uniform and ebony beret sent Asher back to the Day of Rage. Three weeks ago the roundabout was a bastion for the riot police and their armored vehicles, while every centimeter of pavement the taxi had just driven over had been swamped with demonstrators trying to head downtown to the epicenter of the protests Tahrir Square. For a moment, Asher thought he might be able to turn his head and catch a whiff of tear gas in the wind.

The officer, watched by a pair of armed soldiers standing near the curb in splotchy leopard style fatigues, stared vapidly ahead with his back to the cars. Asher wondered if he was afraid to look any of the drivers in the eye. He had read reports in the States of officers getting lynched by disgruntled citizens over traffic tickets or as retribution for past extortion.

Eventually he waved them through and the taxi glided down onto the Corniche. Asher looked out the right side of the car as it drove along. He caught glimpses of the murky Nile over the roofs and walls of riverside cafes and falucca docks that had consumed the river’s banks. Occasionally, he raised his vision and looked at the Nile Tower. Kareem had always wanted to show him the viewing floor; he said it was a view of Cairo only birds could get. The line still seemed cheesy and yet it seemed more important than anything else that had passed through Asher’s mind that morning.

Traffic was kind as the taxi passed swiftly under Sixth of October Bridge. They sped past the British Council and headed under the May 15 Bridge. Asher’s heart lifted a little when he saw a group of young men and children painting the colors of the Egyptian flag on the concrete traffic barrier under the bridge. He took it as a sign of the Revolution in action.

They followed the Corniche for another fifteen minutes until they reached Imbabah Street. Asher told the driver to stop near entrance. As he paid the fare the man glanced out at the street.

“This isn’t a good place.” He said, displaying that quintessentially Egyptian regard for strangers that often made Asher feel embarrassed and delighted at the same time. “There are a lot of thugs here and Salafis, you know, the crazy men with the beards.”

Asher thanked him for his concern and got out. He had experienced this kind of reaction before when he went to Imbabah. A few of his Egyptian colleagues, who were all middle or upper class, had been shocked when they learned that he had a friend there. The area had a bad reputation for just about everything. Crime was high; the Ikwhen controlled half the streets while the Salafis had taken over the other half. Asher had never been affected by any of this. For him, the biggest hassles in Imbabah were the throngs of pedestrians that clogged up the slender side-streets.

Using Kareem’s building as a reference point, Asher navigated his way down Imbabah Street, ignoring the inviting honks of tuk tuk drivers heading the other way. The structure was typical of the half finished and half designed apartment buildings that riddled Cairo. Its white walls had been stained copper brown by years of dust and pollution. He found Kareem’s street and turned left heading down past the ahwa he had frequented with him when they had first met. The doorman at the building greeted him a hefty shake and showed him to the elevator. He pushed the button for Kareem’s floor, seven. Asher knew it was a courtesy but he still felt a tad belittled.

He reached the seventh floor and headed to the family flat. Nearly a dozen people dressed in dark garb were congregating around the flat. Asher only recognized a few of them. He greeted Essam, Kareem’s baker from down the street. His cakes were very dry and tasted like sweetened dough but Kareem had always been sure to buy at least half a kilo of basbusa from him every month. He said, it was because he enjoyed the raw taste of the cake but Asher knew he had done it as an act of charity.

Asher shared a few minutes of chit chat with Essam. They talked about his family, his business, how the neighborhood was doing after the Revolution. Asher had never been good at sustaining small talk so that was about all the coevered. As soon as Essam finished answering them he left him and entered the flat. Another throng of people were gathered in and around the plush sofas and loves seats. A dark air, thicker than a smoggy sky, permeated the room. A few women in ash colored galabiyas and hijabs, perhaps distant relatives of Kareem’s family, sniffled and cried in a corner next to the TV. Somehow, Asher had expected the affair to be louder.

A trio of Kareem’s friends from the street, Abdullah, Amr and Sami, were huddled together somberly around an easy chair. They stood and greeted Asher as soon as he approached, pecking him once on either cheek.

“We’re so glad to see you here,” Abdullah, Kareem’s oldest friend from the neighborhood said.

“I had to come back.” Asher said, quickly realizing that wasn’t what he had intended to say. “Thank you for sending me that email.”

“I had to. I know Kareem and you were very close.”

Asher took a seat and caught up with Abdullah and the others. They had demonstrated alongside Kareem and hundreds of people from Imbabah during the protests. Some still had the scars of those battles with the police and State Security agents. Amr, the son of a car mechanic at the corner of Imbabah Street, had a cast around his left arm; a rubber bullet that had struck him on Sixth of October Bridge during the first protests on January 25^th. The fairer haired teen described the pain he had endured, comparing the agony in his leg to a flaming worm eating away at a peach. Asher wondered what wounds Kareem had endured before his own excruciating end. He couldn’t imagine anything more painful than the death Abdullah had described to him in his message.

As the war stories continued, Asher steered his eyes to other parts of the room searching for the epicenter of the grief. Abdullah, intuitive as always, sensed what he wanted.

“He’s in his room.” He told him. “That’s also where his mother is.”

Asher thanked him. He lingered for a few more minutes, excusing himself after Sami began arguing the coke hadn’t neutralized the affects of tear gas when he had used it on his face. He moved discreetly among the mourners, nodding only once to Reem. A veiled girl who loved color coordinating her eye liner and her headscarf, she lived two floors down and had shared a class with Kareem at Ein Shams University when they were both at school. Of course, they had shared much more together but that was something best never discussed aloud. She thanked him for his sympathy with a feigned smile, wiping away tears from her blackened eyes as her mother watched them from a few cushions away. Asher gave her a reassuring smile as he moved to Kareem’s bedroom.

The room Asher entered was a far cry from the dusty paper and book filled broom closet where he and Kareem had brainstormed with each other for story and film ideas. Three neat stacks of Arabic books and papers stood beside each other near the door while his desktop, a Dell from the time of the Bush Administration, was nestled perfectly in the center of the dusted desk. Kareem’s mother, undoubtedly the architect behind the room’s uncharacteristically cleanly atmosphere, sat on a plastic chair in the center of the empty wooden floor. Her lean body was wrapped tightly in a black galibaya and cotton shawl. The dark colors contrasted morosely with the small forest of vibrant flower bouquets that adorned the end table next to her.

Sprouting up from amongst the blossoms was a silver framed photo of Kareem himself. Asher could tell the photo had been taken several years ago. Kareem had never worn gel in the time he had known him and the distinctive goatee that covered the entire bottom of his chin was nowhere to be seen. The image itself was the typical sort of the glossy, highly brightened photos that peppered the windows of an Egyptian Polaroid shop. Still, Asher couldn’t help but smirk back at his friend; Kareem, smiled uninhibitedly as he always did. His head was cocked to the left in a wily way, almost as if he were daring him to look away.

Asher’s smile evaporated as his eyes veered toward the bed. There, wrapped in a white cotton shawl sitting inside a peridot coffin, was all that remained of his closest Egyptian friend. Asher couldn’t believe how small he looked inside the box or that his body still held its contours. From Abdullah’s gruesome descriptions of the burn damage, Asher had envisioned that there was little to nothing left to bury.

Unsure of exactly what protocol he should follow, Asher approached Kareem’s mother. Slowly, he reached down and rested his palm atop her hand. Like so many working women in Imbabah her henna stained fingers were worn far passed her age. Somehow, the leathery folds in her skin still held a smidgeon of softness. As Asher wondered why no one was with her, she asked him to take a seat on the office chair at Kareem’s desk. Asher obeyed and wheeled beside her. His eyes soon fixed themselves on the body. Somehow, he had expected to feel more distraught or saddened. Perhaps, he was too disturbed to even recognize the depth of the emotion. That didn’t seem right though. He should have felt more but he didn’t.

“We’re honored you came.” Kareem’s mother said; her voice was so firm that it immediately grabbed Asher’s attention.

“Thank you.” He answered.

Kareem’s mother stared through him with her topaz eyes, the same eyes Kareem had used to beguile so many girls on their Friday romps to the Jazz Club.

“How is your family?” She asked.

“They’re all fine,” Asher said. “They send their condolences.”

Those ‘condolences’ boiled down to a few 'I’m sorries' they had given him after he learned the news.

She nodded and forced a smile. Silence came down like a veil between them. Asher felt obliged to say something. He tried to think of something intimate or consoling; the best he could do was I’m sorry.

“He’s a martyr,” She replied; stating it a tone that was laced with forced pride. “I’m proud that he died in such a way. He helped bring down that pig in the suit Hosni. May God one day judge him for all his crimes.”

Asher nodded sympathetically as she took a deep breath and swallowed hard. There was pride in her voice, deep pride, but it couldn’t mask the pain.

“You were with him on Tahrir Street in Dokki, right?” She asked.

Asher hesitated to answer.

“For a while,” He answered, trying not to let a bitter venom of betrayal still his tongue. “ on the Day of Anger.”

She nodded in solemn approval as he glanced down at his right hand. He wondered if she saw his shame.

“Is it true, what Abdullah told me? That he stayed at the front of the line the entire time.”

Asher wasn’t sure. He wanted desperately to move on to another topic.

“Of course.”

She nodded again.

“Good.”

Another time of silence passed; this one was longer than the last. Asher turned back to the body. He thought he could see the distinct break in Kareem’s nose. When they had first met, almost five months ago near Sherra Shaheen, he had told him the story of how he had gotten it. A brawl broke out between his cousin’s family and another family who were stealing their electricity. Kareem had claimed he had fought two men off using a Ramadan lantern as a shield. The vivid and definitely exaggerated expressions he had used were still as clear as the day he had told him the story.

Suddenly Kareem’s mother started trembling. Asher thought she was crying until he realized the sound coming from her mouth was soft laughter. She shook her head and smiled, authentically with her back teeth showing.

“You were laughing,” She told him.

“I was?” Asher said, realizing for the first time that the sides of his mouth were tingling. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She said; which in Arabic could boil down to a single word, malesh. “I’m glad my son can still make someone laugh, even he only makes most of us cry now.”

She called out into the living room, ordering one of her young nieces to bring them some tea. Asher declined several times, as he usually did when offered anything, until he caved in.

“Asher,” She said, pronouncing his name with a long a at the end like every Egyptian. “I want to let you know that you’ll always be welcome here.”

Had she used a softer, gentler tone Asher might have taken her offer as a mere formality, a courtesy offered out of politeness. The flatness in her voice, though, told him she spoke transparently.

Asher thanked her as their tea arrived. The person who brought it was not a niece. It was Kareem’s younger brother, Ayman. Asher stood up and greeted him with two kisses and a tight hug after he set the cups down on the desk. Ayman would follow in his brother footsteps at Ein Shams University next fall and study engineering; that is, if the current students eventually stopped protesting over their Mubarak appointed faculty.

Ayman had always been the jokester of the family, a stereotypical youngest child. His face, dark like his deceased father’s, seemed faded and whitened, like a vibrant movie poster bleached of its color after years of being glued to a wall. It was an eerie sight to see Ayman so solemn.

He joined his mother beside his brother’s body. Asher sipped meekly from his tea as mother and son sat in silence. The brew seemed exceedingly sweet, as if the sugar had been heaped on to mask the bitterness. He tried to remember better times, all the meals he had shared with the family in their living room, the jokes and jibes that had been lovingly inflicted upon each other, the cups of tea and Turkish coffee that massaged the tongue and kept the conversation flowing.

Asher lost himself in that world, the world before January 25^th, before Wael Ghonim and the facebook revolution, before the self immolations on streets, before Ben Ali left Tunis for Riyadh. He was so lost that Ayman had to shake him back to the present. By then, it was time to move the body.

As his mother left the room and fell into the hands of her weeping sisters and cousins, Ayman broke his silence.

“Did you get the stick?” He asked.

Asher nodded, noticing how stern the boy’s eyes seemed. He was looking away from him and beyond the scene in the living room.

“It’s very important you see what’s on there.” He said. “It’s very important someone like you can see it. Kareem told me you would need it for what comes next.”

“I will see it,” Asher promised; unsure of ‘what comes next’ meant. “I haven’t had the time yet.”

“Malesh.”

Ayman glanced at the floor. When he looked back up Asher thought he saw a tear fall from his eye.

“I’ll have to grow up now.” The sixteen year old said. “Mama will depend on me.”

“I’m sorry,” Asher said, wishing yet again he had some magic words. “It’ll be hard.”

He instantly regretted saying that.

“Kareem was our father,” He said. “Now we have no father. Now we are alone.”

Asher could feel his expression sinking as he watched Ayman turn back towards his brother.

“Now, all of us will have to grow up.” He said. “All of us.”

Asher didn’t ask anything more. He didn’t want to bother with his questions about the USB drive and even if he had, Asher was sure he wouldn’t have gotten the answer anyway. Instead, he padded the boy on the shoulder and gave him another tight hug. Leaving the bedroom behind, he stood by himself in a corner of the house just across from the door. He watched quietly as Ayman and a group of men lifted the coffin from the bed for its journey to the cemetery.

As Kareem was carried through the living room, the soft weeping and somber tones vanished for a single moment. The void lingered in the air like a porcelain vase tossed high into the air. Then, the silence fell to the floor and a maelstrom of broken voices and shattered souls swirled around the body. Abdullah hollered like a child and struck his chest. Reem clutched the sides of her head as if her slender hands were all that was keeping her face from sliding off with her tears. It was this kind of outpouring of emotion that was so expected at funerals in Egypt. A sign of the person's importance could be measured by how much those attending whined and wailed.

The mourners swamped his friend as Asher walked behind the storm without a word. He followed the commotion outside the flat and into the hall. An odd intermission occurred when the coffin bearers entered the elevator with the body and went down to the ground level. Some, including Asher, waited for lift to come back up. Others, who were less patient, took the stairs. Both groups continued to weep and wail, albeit in softer tones.

By the time Asher and the others who had waited reached the ground floor, the bearers had already walked out into the street. Asher hustled to catch up. He emerged onto the sidewalk, only to find the coffin had become bogged down by another group of mourners who had appeared. The rest of people in the elevator brushed passed him and resumed their wailing.

The crowd moved out of the narrow road and onto Imbabah Street. It soaked up bystanders and shopkeepers as it marched along. In Egypt, funerals and weddings were almost like open door events, drawing in just as many strangers and distant neighbors as they did family and friends. Asher was sure some of the people who drew alongside him had never known Kareem. He wondered if a grief or trauma brought them here or if it was just another courtesy they felt obliged to fulfill. He had read somewhere, in one of books on Islam that a certain hadith obliged Muslims to participate in a funeral procession if they saw one. He decided it didn’t matter; somehow, the influx of people made him feel as if Kareem was getting the sendoff he deserved.

The procession reached the graveyard in late afternoon, just before sunset. Asher briefly wondered why the actual funeral was so late in the day. It was customary to bury the body as quickly as possible before sunset. He then remembered Abdullah’s email and his question found its answer. A sheikh, who Asher hadn’t seen in the home, abruptly materialized in front of the coffin like a jinn. He took the spot beside Kareem’s mother and led the now thinning crowd to a freshly dug grave in the center of the yard. A pair of gritty grave diggers loitered a few meters away, wiping their shimmering bronze brows and smoking cigarettes. Asher stood alongside Ayman after he and the other men had lowered Kareem into the lahd and turned his head towards Mecca. Streams of mustard colored earth drifted atop the shroud before the bearers put the lid over the coffin.

The sheikh adjusted his white prayer cap and raised the Qur’an above his head. The sight of the book, the Prophet Muhammad’s only miracle as some called it, stopped the few youth who were still shouting slogans. As the imam began to speak, the men in the crowd raised their hands. Asher drew his attention to Kareem’s mother. She had been at the front of the line since they left the home. Not once, during that entire time had Asher seen her cry. She still remained stoic, unlike the other women in the family, some of whom were still wailing over the sheikh’s prayers.

Asher tuned back in just as the second takbir left the sheikh’s hairy lips. He remained quiet as the crowd reciprocated with a solemn Allahu Akbar. A prayer in fusha was offered for the prophet Muhammad. When this prayer was over the third takbir was pronounced and the prayer for Kareem’s soul began. Asher didn’t understand the Qur’anic Arabic the sheikh recited; he had only studied the Egyptian dialect. He had read another translated funeral prayer once though, a long time ago in some cramped niche of his college library. It was this prayer, or the part of it that he best remembered, which Asher recited in his mind as the sheikh gave his:

God, do forgive him and have mercy on him and make him secure and overlook his shortcomings, and bestow upon him an honored place in Paradise, and make his place of entry spacious, and wash him clean with water and snow and ice, and cleanse him of all wrong as Thou doest clean a piece of white cloth of dirt…

“Ameen.” The sheikh said when the prayer was finished.

“Ameen.” Asher and the rest of the crowd answered.

The fourth and final du’a prayer was pronounced, this one for all Muslims. The salat al-janaza was over and, God willing, Kareem would rest in peace. The sheikh leaned in towards Kareem’s mother; his silver speckled beard touched her shoulder as he whispered in her ear. She acknowledged his condolence with a nod; all the while, her focus remained on the green box in the trench beneath her feet.

A winter breeze blew across the graveyard, knocking awry some of Asher’s dark hair. As he brushed away his bangs, Ayman plunged his fist into the sky.

“Paradise for the martyrs!” He cried. “Hellfire for Mubarak!”

A few shebab from the dispersing crowd repeated his call, but they were few and far between. Asher and Abdullah tried to consul Ayman as he collapsed onto his knees in a sobbing fit.

“It’s over,” He told them, clutching his face. “Go home and leave me with him.”

Asher and Abdullah obeyed. The grave diggers had begun filling in the hole, their eyes occasionally glancing to Kareem’s mother as if she were their foreman. Asher crept along the grave’s edge and approached her. He had never seen anyone look so despondent and so strong at the same time.

“Is it alright if I stay until they fill in the grave?” He asked.

She turned to him. She didn’t smile but the flickers of ruby sunlight in her eyes seemed to shine like a grateful smirk. She agreed and Asher stood by her side. Kilo after kilo of yellow earth was poured atop the body, and as Kareem disappeared forever beneath the ground Asher wondered how quickly his memory would fade too. Ayman cried on his knees until the grave was complete, hissing a funeral nasheed between his sobs as the diggers smoothed the soil. By the time they had begun to put in the tombstone, only Kareem’s mother, brother and a handful of friends and relatives remained.

The tombstone, decorated with elegant Arabic calligraphy, was indecipherable to Asher. Whatever it said, he was sure it did Kareem justice. It was then as the sun’s head disappeared over Imbabah’s stained rooftops that Asher decided he had to leave. He could have stayed by the grave all night if he had wanted but he knew it wouldn’t have done any good.

Asher bade Kareem’s mother farewell. He briefly rested his hand on Ayman’s head as he continued to weep. He then left discreetly through the graveyard, navigating his way past the hundreds of souls waiting for the Day of Judgment to come and set them free. Asher had never been very religious, but he had always found something spiritual in graveyards.

He walked out to Imbabah Street and found a white and black cab to take him back to Meden el Dokki. They drove past a pack of boys playing soccer in a side street. The taxi stopped briefly as the kids collected their ball from the main road. Asher felt disgusted with himself for loathing the smiles they gave him. The cab drove back onto the Cornish sliding precariously into traffic. Asher wondered if the celebrations were still going on in Tahrir. He imagined the carnival atmosphere Kareem had told him about in his emails while he was in the States.

As they approached 26^th of July Bridge, Asher briefly contemplated asking the driver to go across the Nile and into downtown. He changed his mind quickly though and kept quiet as they passed the on ramp. If he went to Tahrir he would also have to visit the spot where Kareem had been found the night he died.

He wasn’t prepared for that yet. Not now. The taxi disappeared into the darkness under 6^th of October Bridge, emerging into the orange street lights on the other side. Asher looked up at the Nile Tower again. The red light atop its peak flashed on and off like a beacon and he dared to dream that Kareem was there now. One day he would go there too. For now he would go home and journal about today and prepare himself for his return to the office.

Life was already beginning to go on, without Kareem.

Gamal Mustafa @gamalmustafathelegend21

This revolution is not over yet. Shafiq and all members of the old regime must go! To the Square once again!

Aya Sohrab @Aya48

Down, down with all the collaborators! No members of Mubarak’s criminal gangs in our new government.

Islam Mohamed @IslamMO

I a youth of the revolution, will bring Shafiq down and continue this. We all will.

Ishaq Rafik @Killerishaq43

I pray Mr Shafiq does the right things and resigns, he has no choice. It will spare this country so much more pain if he does.

True Muslim @Shaheed203

As the messenger of God has spoken “O Allah! Lord of Power (and Rule), You give power to whom You please: You endure with honor whom You please, and You bring low whom You please: in Your hands is all Good. Verily, over all things You have power.”

Anwar the Hero @Anwarthehero

God Bless the Christians of Egypt during this painful time. 1^st Mubarak soon it will be Shafiq and then all of us will be in trouble.

El Mujahid3 @El Mujahid3

Oh Lord! Or struggle is not over.

٤ (Four)٤

           'I will not run red lights in the new Egypt' the bumper sticker on the back of the truck said as Asher sat in a microbus on Dokki Street. Sunday traffic was still as congested as ever as the bus lurched forward every few minutes. The driver, a portly man with a receding hairline, tuned out the chorus of horns by tuning to radio Tahrir. An anthem of the Revolution, Sout el Horeya, drowned out the ruckus outside. The strings and lyrics perked Asher up. He had had trouble sleeping Saturday night and seemed to have picked up a cold somewhere along the way between Chicago and Cairo. He wished he was in a better state for his first day back at work.

As he looked out the window and watched the cars inching forward towards the upscale neighborhood of Mohandiseen, Asher was sure there was something different about the traffic today, apart from the 25^th of January stickers and Egyptian flags that embellished the rear windows of half of the vehicles. As strange a thought as it was, Asher felt as if the spaces and distances between the vehicles had gotten larger. Of course it could have been his imagination.

When the bus finally reached the corner of Sphinx Square, Asher told the driver to pull over and climbed out. He handed his fare off to the passenger riding shotgun. He climbed out and walked slowly along the base of the May 15^th Bridge, pausing to buy a pack of tissues from the old woman sitting on the ground with a baby girl. He blew his nose and walked into Agouza, bypassing an ahwa crammed with men taking their morning tea and shisha. He turned down onto Abu Mahasen el Shazly Street. He avoided the sidewalk and walked in the unofficially designated pedestrian space that existed between the cars parked along the sidewalk and the center of the street. The sidewalks were usually too cluttered to be treaded on.

Brushing past the doorman for his office building, Asher popped into the elevator and rode up to fourth floor. He checked the time on his mobile and was surprised to find that he was a few minutes earlier than he had expected. His company, Emblem, was split between two flats that occupied one half of the floor. Like many business outlets in Cairo they had once been private homes that were bought out by a company and renovated into offices. Still, the layout of the building gave away the original design.

As he walked into his wing of the office and scanned in, Asher heard the robust voice of the administrative manager, Asmaa. Asher felt his face warm the moment he stepped into her cubicle. Asmaa seemed just as happy to see him, so much so that she put down her phone and greeted him properly.

“Ahlan, Ahlan, Ahlan.” She chirped as she reached out and grabbed his hand.

Asmaa was a small woman with a little potbelly whose loud headscarves contrasted heavily with her pale face and dark cinnamon eyes. Since he had started working at Emblem, Asher had gotten close to the thirty something mother of two. She was something of an aunt to him now, a confidant who also sometimes unloaded a few of her troubles on him. That wasn’t too often though. Generally speaking most Egyptians didn’t bear their personal lives.

Unable to take the empty chair at the abandoned desk across from Asmaa, Asher took a seat at the rickety wooded dining chair that sat parallel to both chairs. As soon as he sat down the conversation turned to politics.

“So what do you think of the new Egypt?” Asmaa asked him, speaking in English as she usually did so she could hone her language skills.

Asher thought for a moment.

“At first glance, it seems a lot like the old one; on the second glance I think I see more spaces.”

Asmaa chuckled.

“You put things so uniquely.” She said. “That’s right, uniquely?”

“Yeah, that’s how you say it.” Asher assured her. “How was your family during the protests?”

She smiled dreamily.

“We were fine; I took my girls to Tahrir on the fourth and the eleventh. It was so amazing; it was the first time in my life where I felt proud to be Egyptian.”

Asher nodded and grinned bitter-sweetly.

“That is amazing,” He said. “I wish I had been there.”

Asmaa nodded and glanced briefly at the papers on her desk. Asher followed her gaze to a CV bearing a photo of a young woman with blond highlights.

“You’re still looking for an assistant?”

“Of course, the Revolution messed up our workflow, especially before Mubarak stepped down. I’m only starting to the first applicants now.”

Asmaa’s brows tightened as she spoke, her swinging back and forth between the photo and the vacant chair. It was as if she was trying to judge how well the girl would fill the empty spot.

“I miss Dina.” She said; her voice suddenly sank like a coin dropped into a pool.

The name also made ripples in Asher’s mind.

“Me too.”

Asmaa looked up from the paper and nodded with a warm and sympathetic grin.

They chatted for about fifteen minutes, catching up on what had happened to them since Asher and called her to say goodbye on the second of February. Asmaa had been wary of the first demonstrations that took place on the 25^th of January. She had been sympathetic to the shebab and their quest for dignity and a voice but she doubted anything would come of it. After all, there had been plenty of protests in the past, dozens that were stamped out by the police and secret services. Now, she sang the praises of the young men and women who had spear-headed the rebellion and for the first time in her life she was free to let loose her true feelings about her former President.

“Mubarak’s had thirty years to make this country better,” She lamented, bearing her incisors as she bit down on the hated demagogue’s name. “And he did nothing; half our country is illiterate and lives on a loaf of bread a day. I hope they pull him out of his mansion in Sharm and lock him away forever.”

Asher could tell how much Asmaa was relishing these words. In the old Egypt, it was hard to get anyone to even talk about politics, and even then the conversation usually ended pretty quickly with a few causal remarks about the poor economy.

Asher eventually departed, leaving her to her files as he entered the office he shared with the other marketing people. For the rest of the morning, he spent the bulk of his time catching up. First, he sorted through a few dozen unopened messages in his outlook account. Within an hour he had finished sending all the necessary responses and follow ups. He paused for a ten minute break and ordered a Nescafe with laban (milk) from the office buffet. Within fifteen minutes, the office boy, Salam, appeared in the doorway. His yellow grin, formed by two rows of tiny crooked teeth, was a welcome sight.

“Welcome back,” Salam said, resting the heart and puppy covered mug that he had assigned to Asher on the desktop..

“Thank you,” Asher answered. “I’m very happy to be back. How is everything?”

“Good,” Salam smiled back, running his hand across his oiled scalp. “You went to America, correct?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Ha, ok. Are you scared?”

Asher cocked his head in surprise. The question seemed very strange, not least because Salam was still beaming as he asked it.

“Excuse me?”

“Are you scared of Egypt, now?” He clarified.

The scars on Salam’s dark face showed as his grin faded and his cheeks sagged. Asher wondered if there was something else on the young teen’s mind.

“No,” He answered, taking care to sound firm. “I’m not scared. I know things won’t be easy for now but I’m not scared.”

Salam’s grin quickly returned. Egyptians, it seemed to Asher, were always eager to get their smiles back after they had faded.

“I’m glad,” He said. “That means more tourists will come back.”

“Inshallah.”

The short conversation with Salam was the first of many Asher would have that day with his colleagues. The second came when Miriam, a Copt and the only female marketing executive, arrived. Fond of flashy bags and shiny crosses, she often questioned him for info on America, ostensibly because she was interested in migrating there. In came as no surprise when after the usual pleasantries she began to tap him for info.

Asher was about halfway through explaining which states had the warmest weather, when Mustafa walked in. Asher stood and shook his hand still focusing on his exchange with Salam.

“You, ok?” Mustafa asked him, in English.

“Yeah, of course,” Asher quickly nodded. “Just tired from the flight; I had a pretty heavy weekend too.”

“No worries,” Mustafa chuckled, adjusting the thick framed, square glasses that had become so fashionable among professionals. “We had a couple heavy weeks.”

Asher smiled. He liked that Mustafa was still very much himself. Light hardheartedness and confidence had always been great strengths of his. It was something admirable, something to be envied.

Mustafa took a seat at the desk across from Asher, passing a few jokes with Miriam who giggled. Asher continued catching up, alternating between working on a new campaign slogan for the Sakkara Group and engaging in quick chit chat with other colleagues who stopped by. He didn’t initiate political discussions with anyone. Yet several people asked him about what Americas had thought of their revolution.

“To be honest,” He told one of his creative directors, a bearded Copt in his thirties named George. “Most people think it’s a good thing; though some people are worried.”

It was shortly after this talk with George that the phone on Asher desk rang. It was coming from the boss’ office.

“Hello,”

“Ash, what’s up?” The voice of Karen, their American CEO said.

Asher chuckled. He hadn’t expected to hear a phrase like that.

“Pretty good,” He replied. “What can I do you for?”

“Come stop by my office, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Ok, I’ll be right over.”

As he stood up and brushed off the front of his shirt, Asher smiled and thought of how much he had missed Karen’s voice. He had been intimidated by it in the first few months at the office; nearly everyone was. Yet, in time, he had come to appreciate it along with the woman herself. She made Emblem a home for all her employees. It was this firm motherly touch that greeted Asher the second he entered her office and found Karen sipping tea with their production manager Neveen.

After some mild pleasantries, Neveen slipped out, leaving Asher to sitting across the desk from Karen and her huge Macintosh monitor. For a woman in her early forties, who had spent the bulk of her adult life dealing with Cairo's urban frustrations, a cross cultural marriage to an Egyptian husband and three children, she always looked remarkably fresh. Her blue eyes and bright gold hair had a way of commanding your attention. Perhaps, it was just because her features stood out in an environment full of dark pupils and ebony heads. Standing out, was something that seemed to define her.

“Glad to see you back,” She said, taking a sip from her coffee as her eyes darted back and forth between Asher and her monitor. “Good flight?”

“All things considered.” Asher said, trying to swallow a yawn he could feel slithering up his throat.

“Great,” She smiled. “I got to tell you I wasn’t thrilled about handling your magazines on my own.”

Asher felt strangely flattered.

“I’m glad to be back in Egypt.”

It was then that his eyes landed on a tiny Egyptian flag sticking to the back of her computer monitor.

“Revolutions bring out my patriotic side.” Karen mused, before turning a little more serious. “Anything with red white and black on it sells like mad. It’s about the only thing that’s selling these days.”

Asher nodded blankly as Karen set her coffee down. They talked for a few more minutes, mostly about CNN and Fox’s abysmal analysis of the protests in Egypt, yet Asher felt as if the object of their discussion had already been reached. They had reached the center of the maze and were taking a short jaunt around a fountain. In time, they came back to the heart of the matter.

“I’ll be honest with you Asher, I have some bad news and I wanted to level with you first before I told the other employees. We were out of the office for two weeks and with the uncertainty in the market, most of our clients have dropped or delayed their projects. Because of this, Emblem hasn’t made any money this month.”

I hate to do this to you, since you just got back but since your salary is higher than the other marketing executives, we want to halve your pay for this month so we can balance our books without making other cutbacks.”

Asher nodded.

“Is anyone else getting their salary cut?”

“No,” She answered. “I chose you because you get paid a lot more already and because you don’t have a family to support here. If I didn’t cut yours for this month I’d have to cut the salaries of other people like Asmaa. That’s why. If you want some other form of compensation we can work it out.”

Asher didn’t think that was necessary. He knew he could survive pretty easily on half of the 10,000 LE salary he collected each month. Five thousand alone was great by Egyptian standards. It was enough to pay for his rent and allow him to save for a trip.

“I don’t mind.” He said. “Not if it’s temporary and helps others put food on their tables.”

Karen smiled.

“It is and it does.” She assured him. “Thanks for being so understanding.”

Asher shrugged.

“Times are tough right now, I understand that.”

“It’s tough sure, but what’s worst is uncertainty. Nothing’s worse for business than ambiguity.”

After exchanging some other tidbits about each others' family life, Asher excused himself and walked back to his desk. As he passed the reception, he spotted a tissue box on the counter, emblazoned with the Egyptian eagle and the letters Jan 25^th in English. Asher marveled at how even tissues seemed to have suddenly become more Egyptian.

The rest of the day passed largely without any big event. Asher received only one or two emails and spent the bulk of his hours developing slogans and editing text for a glass factory’s website. His free minutes, and there were many, he spent surfing the web. Mostly he read analysis about the Revolution.

Throughout the day Asher occasionally thought about his pay cut, or rather his reaction to it. He wondered if any of his colleagues would have reacted so passively to being singled out like that. Somehow, Asher began to feel as if he had done something wrong in not fighting for his salary.
He wondered if this was his American side talking or some sense of entitlement that had leaked into him from his middle and upper middle class Egyptian friends and colleagues. He was leaning towards the former as a dispute between Miriam and Asmaa over an invoice that one of her clients was refusing to pay. In a strange way, Asher had missed these loud confrontations. America was a quiet place sometimes.

As the squabbling escalated, Asher checked the time in the right hand corner of his screen. It was 4:47, which in his opinion was a good time to leave. And so, after filling out his end of day report he took off, entering the street outside the building. As he watched two men sputter by on a motorcycle, Asher was struck by how uneventful his day had been. Apart from the news about his salary there was absolutely nothing he had seen or heard in his office to suggest that the country was in a time of historical change. Only a few small Egyptian flags hinted at it.

Thirsty and itching for shisha, Asher stepped into the street and made his way to Gar Howa a small ahwa just across the street from a mosque. Taking a seat on one of the many plastic chairs on the sidewalk, Asher ordered a hookah with flavorless tobacco and a platter of French fries, potatis. When it came to smoking shisha, he preferred apple or toot flavoring. It seemed like an afternoon to tough it out and take things in their purest, rawest form.

As he sat by himself outside the café, smoking and looking up between the branches of a large ficus, Asher was suddenly struck by the fact that he hadn’t inspected Kareem’s USB drive. Actually, he hadn’t given any thought to it all.

It was strange. He thought to himself. Why hadn’t it been on his mind? He had spent the remainder of his weekend unpacking and musing in his journal. He had called one friend, Tamer, so they could meet up on Tahrir on Friday to see a large gathering of protesters demonstrating against Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s last Prime Minister who still retained his position in the new government after his patron had left office. There had been plenty of time for him to think about it, plenty of minutes and even hours to open up whatever it was his friend had left for him. So why neglect it?

Asher didn’t really know. He just didn’t feel any urgency to look into it. In truth, there was something else that was beginning to occupy his thoughts. Then, he got a call.

Asher debated about answering when he saw the caller ID. Nevertheless, he pressed talk and re-opened the channel.

“Hello!” A chipper, honeyed voice chimed in his ear.

“Hi Dina,” Asher answered. “How are you?”

“It’s so good to hear you!” She said. “I was so worried you wouldn’t get back.”
           “No, I’m here.” He said. “I’m back at the office. How are you doing?”
           “Alhamdulillah. I was worried for a few days they would fire me from the new job Karen got for me. Even now companies are talking about firing people.”
           Asher nodded, even though he knew she couldn’t see him.
          “I’m happy for you.” He answered.

There was a long pause. Asher wondered if she was wearing the gypsy skirt of pink and ocean blue. She always looked beautiful in that.
           “You are ok?” She finally asked.
           Asher wondered if his tone had been too flat. He always sounded distant when he was upset or had something on his mind.

“Yeah, I’m just a little jet-lagged.”
           “What? I'm sorry I don't understand.”
            He had answered in English because he didn’t know what jet lag was in Arabic.
            “Yani,” He replied, switching back to Arabic. “I’m tired because of my flight.”
            “Ahhhh,” She said. “Sorry, to bother you.”
            “No, you’re not a bother at all.”
             There was another pause, though not as long as the first.
            “Really, I’ve missed you, and I’ve missed talking to you. Can I meet you this week?”
          Asher paused. There was a big part of him that wanted to see her again and another that wanted him to just hang up. He decided to go a middle way.
         “Not this week,” He said. “I’ll be busy at work and then I’m visiting some other people over the weekend. How about Sunday?”
         “Sunday should be free for me,” She answered, sounding uplifted. “I’ll SMS you the time.”
         “Great,” He said, allowing himself to smile. “I’ll see you then. Go to Hell ya Dina.”
          She giggled at their inside joke.
        “Okay, Go to Hell ya Asher.”

٥ (Five) ٥

Asher had never been to Tahrir Square during the Revolution. He had rarely given it a second thought before the 25^th. He guessed most Egyptians hadn’t either. In truth, the square was a fairly insignificant looking place, compared with say El Hussein or Islamic Cairo. It scarcely looked the part of the center of a city, let alone the beating heart of a Revolution still unfolding.

An elevated circle of grass was at the area’s center, the cog of an enormous roundabout where a large portion of Cairo’s legendary traffic passed by every day. Pruned shrubs were scattered across its trampled grass and barren ground which seemed to have overtaken the earth. To the west, enclosed by a wall of green, iron guardrails lay the Moogama, the bastion of Egyptian bureaucracy and a symbol of the ineptitude and indifference Egyptians had come to expect from their government. The building, originally built as a hotel, had become so emblematic of the authorities’ corruption that the great Adel Imam, the Marlon Brando of Egyptian cinema, had made a hit film lampooning its apathetic staff.  

Asher, who, like all foreign residents in Egypt had to visit the building annually to renew his visa, had been mildly disappointed that the building had not met the same fate as the NDP headquarters a few hundred meters away. Once the heart and soul of the National Democratic Party, the multistory building’s smog stained façade had gone unnoticed until the Revolution, when demonstrators had set it alight on the 28^th of January. Now, it was nothing but a charred shell, with blackened windows and abandoned air-conditioning units clinging to its side.

Just in front of the gutted building was the construction site of the Ritz Carlton with the chalk white Arab League Headquarters on one side and the rose tinged Egyptian National Museum on the other. Both buildings had a certain Victorian elegance that seemed slightly out of place in Africa’s megalopolis.

This discrepancy was more apparent when one looked at the buildings that faced towards these four structures; mustard buildings, tainted like all Cairo’s buildings with smog streaks. The high-rises’ many balconies for their many apartments hung out over the square, supported by first floors dominated by travel agencies, airline offices, hostels and travel shops. Many were still closed for business, shut behind metal curtains.

This was the setting Asher observed from beneath the statue of one of Cairo’s most learned judges that stood in front of the mosque. Yet hardly anyone would have seen these buildings as anything other than a faded urban backdrop had they been in Asher’s spot this Friday.

Every inch of pavement, asphalt and dirt across downtown was hidden beneath a whirpool of faces, clothes and red, white and black. Egyptian flags, made of every conceivable material from mesh to cotton, flew from the hand of almost every person present, flapping and spinning in the hands of their owners. They were almost dancing to the voices of the multiple speakers inside the square as they addressed the crowds over the scratchy sounds of the mikes and audio system. The atmosphere, more a carnival than a protest, was utterly infectious. A woman in hijab, cradled two little girls in her arms, as a man painted their tiny cheeks. Shebab, some wearing afro wigs and cradling signs, sat atop the traffic lights just in front of the Moogama. Tea shops, mango stalls, pretzel vendors abounded. Tents, smaller than the massive city that dominated the center of the Square a week or two earlier, were scattered about the central roundabout and open areas of grass and dirt, including the statue where Asher was observing. Here, families camped on thin plastic mats watching the festivities, joking between loafs of balidy bread and fuul. Men, activists and average citizens alike debated politics; the new parties that were forming, the dangers of the old regime, the influence of America on the next government. 

Asher wished he could have explored more of the Square at that moment but held his place at the foot of the statue. His friend Tamer was supposed to meet him there. He was a few minutes late, a not too unusual phenomenon in this part of the world.  

Eventually, Tamer’s spindly frame popped out from between the shoulders of two bearded Salafi men. The epitome of someone who was all skin and bones, Asher had always marveled a little that Tamer had enough muscle to keep his lungs working. He was so thin, that whenever Asher grabbed his hand it took him an extra moment to feel the skin and bone beneath the layer of hair that covered his arms. 

“Hello, hello, hello!” His friend called out in Arabic as they embraced. 

They exchanged cheek kisses, before Tamer briefly wiped his glasses and put them back over his hazel eyes. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I was taking photos in Shubra.” 

“No problem,” Asher answered. “I’ve just been watching from here. It’s quite a thing to see in person.” 

“Our new country.” Tamer beamed. “Let me show it to you.” 

Tamer had every reason to smile now, just as he had every reason to be morbidly depressed before the 25^th of January. Like so many people under the age of 30 in Egypt, he had been deeply discontented; unable to pursue his dream of film-making, because he came from a slightly lower class. He had worked a series of freelance photography jobs across Cairo. His earnings were barely enough to help his aging father feed his four children and pay off the flat they lived in. The Revolution had flipped his world upside down, in more ways than one.

“Everyone wants my photos now,” he exclaimed as they began to push their way through the crowds, joining a stream of people flowing into the center of the square as they tried to bypass a current of demonstrators heading out . “I even got an offer from some publication in the US…Time, I think.”
The optimism in Tamer’s voice was gratifying for Asher to hear.

“That’s great ya Tamer.,” Asher said. “So where are we heading anyway?”

“I’ll show you where I was on the 28^th and from there we can go somewhere for tea.”

The Castle of the Nile Bridge, Qasr el Nil in Arabic, had been part of the main thoroughfare for groups of demonstrators heading into downtown from Giza, Dokki and Haram City. The bridge, which connected downtown to the Nile island of Zamalek, had been the last leg for many demonstrators on a long and bitter path strewn with rubber bullets, tear gas canisters and batons. It had been a road Tamer had endured on the Day of Rage.

After passing a pair of tanks guarding the bridge’s entrance to the Square, Asher and Tamer arrived at the feet of one of two pairs of stone lions marking the entrances to the bridge.
“Here’s where we finally broke through,” Tamer said, his voice brimming with somberness as he recalled that frantic struggle. “That was such a long day; running back and forth. The tear gas got everywhere, our eyes, our noses, our clothes; we were infected with it but the infection only made us stronger because it went straight to our souls; it made us that more sure that we were doing the right thing.”

They walked halfway across the bridge, the Nile on either side. They paused besides one of the many tea shops on the sidewalk, ignoring the calls of the owner to take a seat on one of his plastic chairs.

“They fought us here too,” Tamer continued, drawing a line with his hand across the center of the bridge where motorcycles and horse drawn carriages now competed for space with throngs of pedestrians. “They could never hold us back for long though. There were too many of us. We would have gotten across that bridge no matter what. That was the way it had to be.”

Asher tried his hardest to imagine this crossway of the Nile as it had been on that day. Row upon row of ebony uniformed men with batons and shields looking deep into a tide that would sweep them all away. He started to wonder what would have raced through the mind of the average riot policeman on that day. He couldn’t; somehow all he could think of was the people on the other side, the people like his friend Tamer who could easily smile with pride over what they had accomplished.

With the tour more or less concluded, the pair made their way back to the Square. After having their IDS checked again by the soldiers at the tank, they made their way down the wide boulevard between the Moogama and the old campus of the American University of Cairo. Distracted by a group of about a dozen members of the formerly outlawed militant group Gamaa Islamiyaa marching for the release of their spiritual guide, Omar Abdul Rahman, Asher didn’t notice the route Tamer was taking to get to Borsa. Only when his eyes passed over the surreal sight of the confederate stars and bars flying from one of larger flag shops on the corner of Mohamed Mahmud Street did Asher spot the yellow star of the Hardees that stood on the corner.

Quickly, hastily he called out to Tamer.
The alarm in his friend’s expression told Asher he had let his panic drip into his voice.

“What’s up, man?” Tamer asked in English.
To his shock, Asher stammered.

“W-w-well,…”

He swallowed hard and started again.
“It’s nothing; I just want to go another route.”
Tamer winced and glanced back down the street towards the army check point a few meters down.

Asher knew what he was thinking.

“It’s not the army,” Asher told him. “Let’s just go along Talat al Harb street instead.”

“Sure, friend, ” Tamer replied. “Do you want to tell me what’s up?”

“Maybe later; it’s complicated.”

They walked along Talat Al Harb Street, passing through yet another army checkpoint. They then passed by the famous fel fela restaurant, glimpsing the spacious Talat Al Harb Square. It was around this roundabout that the Yacoubian Building stood. It was another landmark Asher had barely paid any attention to before the Uprising. Its faded luster was evident, and it was just as Aswany had described it. The large window at the very summit of the building’s façade stared at the crowds milling about in Tahrir. It was almost like a watchman, overshadowing the statue of a nineteenth century pasha at the square’s center whose name was probably not even remembered among most Egyptians.

After some indecisiveness, the pair settled on the Oriental, an old café that had been serving coffee, tea and juices ever since the 1940s. Despite the passage of time, the café still retained some of that old sophistication, its thick wooden tables and bars giving it a pub-like quality. They took a seat in one of the booths and ordered Turkish coffee. Asher glanced out at the street a few times as his friend snapped a few shots of one of the waiter's serving tea to a female protester in the café who was draped in the colors of the April 6^th activist group.

“You heard about Libya, right?” Tamer asked after he had gotten his shots.

“Yeah, I did.,” Asher answered. “Fucking Gaddafi; his insanity would be hilarious if he wasn’t standing behind an army.”

Tamer nodded as their drinks arrived; thick black espresso poured into the kind of tiny porcelain cups you would see at a toddler’s tea party.

“Inshallah, he’ll fall too; Tunisia lit the match but we poured the fuel on the fire. Now there’s nothing to stop it. Yemen, Syria, Bahrain Libya, we’re all going to change.”

Asher nodded and took a sip of his coffee.

“Do you mind if we stopped talking about politics for a little bit?”

Tamer laughed.

“You know these days it’s all we can talk about. Even if we don’t want to or try not to the conversation always comes back to politics.”

Asher smiled.

“Okay, can we try anyway?”
“Go ahead, friend.”

Asher took another glance outside the window. He spotted a woman in niqab wearing a head visor over her veil with the Muslim Brotherhood’s emblem on it.

“I got a call from you know who?”

“Who?”

“Dina.”
“Ah, okay; that girl you’ve liked since forever?”

“Yeah, she said she wanted to meet me.”

Tamer’s eyes widened as he nodded.

“Interesting. Do you know if she finally is interested?”

“I don’t know,” Asher replied. “I don’t really know if I want to see her now.”

Tamer was quiet for a while as he rubbed his hands together.

“Then don’t,” he said. “Personally, I think this is a dead end but if you want to go after her one more time, that’s your choice.”
Asher nodded and took another sip of his coffee; the concentrated, caffeinated sludge was making his heart flutter. In the distance he could still hear the voices of speakers shouting over each other in the Square.

“Is there something else on your mind?” Tamer wondered. “You seem very distracted.”

Asher shrugged and tried to look as attentive as possible.

“Yeah, I’m fine though; can I ask you something else?”

“Haha, you’re very awkward when it comes to changing subjects…sure, what?”
“Would you rather be truthful or happy?”

Tamer smiled and turned his eyes towards the ceiling; his eyes seemed to pierce through the wood and concrete towards the sky.

“Wow, that’s such a question. I can only choose between them? I can’t be truthful and happy at the same time?”
“In my experience that’s usually not how it works,” Asher said.

Tamer shook his head.

“You have a sad outlook on life, my dear friend. I honestly don’t know if anyone could live a happy life based on a lie. You’d always know you were lying, right? Or is that not the case?”

“Hmmh, I guess I should have rephrased the question then.”

“Go ahead, what do you want to say?”

Asher had to think for a while. He ordered a glass of lemon juice to offset the bitterness on his tongue.

“I guess what I mean is: Is truth important if discovering or revealing it only brings more pain for you or another person? “

Tamer crossed his bony arms and glanced back at the girl in the April 6^th shirt; Asher guessed he fancied her.

“It sounds like you hurt somebody, right?”

Asher hesitated before nodding.

“Was it serious?”

Another nod.

“And does this person know how you wronged them?”
“I’m not sure it makes a difference at this point.”

“Well if it still does make a difference, I would say tell all but under these conditions. You obviously feel bad already; so ask yourself would revealing everything you did make you feel any worse than you already are and would revealing this truth to the person you wronged damage them in a deeper way?”

It was a good point; Asher took another sip of his juice.

“Asher,” Tamer said, leaning in closer across the table. “What are we talking about here? What have you gotten yourself into?”

Asher started to answer when a debate between a waiter and a customer over a tip escalated into a shouting and flailing match. The fight distracted everyone in the café until the manager solved the issue with a few taps on the shoulders and a few pointed fingers.

“I swear to God, we fight over everything,” Tamer stated. “I hope we get more civil after the revolution. I think this regime and its thugs made us very hard towards each other. Oh, speaking of thugs, did you hear they arrested Mubarak’s interior minister last week?”

Asher always marveled at how conversations in Egypt could suddenly change direction on the slightest alterations in the atmosphere. It was like the speakers were only around for the ride. In any case, it suited him here. He wasn’t willing to unveil details about his guilty conscience.

They sat discussing the political situation for an hour or so, meandering from issue to issue. Around two Tamer, got a SMS on his phone and took off for a shoot on a documentary team he was working with.

Asher said his goodbyes and lingered in the café for a while. He drank a second lemon juice and watched as the square continued to fill with people. He did this until 2:45 when he got up, paid his bill and made his way to Talat Al Harb Square himself. He then turned down another side street and headed west, arriving at around the middle of Mohamed Mahmud street at the end of the AUC campus.

Here, there was a small intersection, with road leading west towards the interior ministry and another street heading north to Tahrir. It was a relatively bland fragment of the city with little to no activity. Most people entered Tahrir from other avenues. Yet to Asher this particular stretch of this particular street was sacred ground.

After standing almost frozen on the sidewalk, Asher moved across Mohamed Mahmud and walked a few meters to the interior ministry. He was sure he could face it now; or rather that was what he was telling himself as he strode across the asphalt with trembling strides. He stepped back onto the sidewalk a few moments later. His sight remained entirely centered on the small metal rectangle that covered the entrance to the grey building with black shutters that stood behind the children’s academy.

He leaned briefly against the structure’s walls and turned to face the human traffic. A sudden shudder reverberated across his body. It came from his chest, as if an ice-cube had suddenly been dropped inside him. He pressed his open palm against the wall and braced himself; a breath in, a breath out, a breath in and then one final exhale.

The spent air, laced with car fumes and exhaust, managed to bring Asher, trembling, around the corner of the shack. A void opened in his mind as he beheld the spot he had seen in the photograph on Al Masry Al Youm’s article.

The thick blossom-like scorch marks had been wiped away. There was no trace of the petrol tanks or scorched jacket and kefeyah that the two soldiers in that photo had been holding either. A few burnt pieces of paper and small flakes of ash were all he could make out on the concrete wide-walk. There was a chance even the ash belonged to a few cigarette butts lying on the bottom of the curb. Asher stared at the nearly vacant spot for some time. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it had been like for Kareem as he lay there burning; had he been able to see between the flames until the very end? Had his nerves been seared off completely by the time he hit the concrete? Who or what had he thought of as his final moments sizzled away with his skin?

Asher opened his eyes and checked the time on his mobile; about three minutes had passed. He kneeled down on the curb and stared at the seed sized chips in the cement of the sidewalk. He hoped the street would give up its secret and tell him what had happened to his friend the night Egypt overthrew Mubarak and burst into a new era only a few meters away. The silence and emptiness was complete though. Cairo’s concrete and asphalt alleys were tight-lipped as always, yielding nothing. Under other conditions, Asher might have found the emptiness comforting; instead his guilt was all the more tangible. He couldn’t even bear to whisper an apology to the ashes. Instead, Asher stood up and walked away heading towards Sadat metro station.

٦ Six ٦

It hadn’t been the easiest day at work. A client, one of the company’s largest, had skipped out on another invoice delaying employee salaries for another week. Karen had been screaming on the phone most of the day. Meanwhile, a project that had been handed over from Mustafa to Rasha, sent to the client under her watch, had come back with a large error resulting in a blame match between the two that had forced Asher to withdraw to one of the meeting rooms to continue working.

The evening wasn’t shaping up to be too easy either. Just after he had arrived home last Friday, around the same time the military police were beating demonstrators in Tahrir, Dina had called him asking if they could meet at a farewell party for her cousin on Thursday instead of Sunday. Asher had briefly met Amir a few months earlier at a café when he was helping Dina with her English studies. They had only exchanged their names and work backgrounds and hadn’t spoken since. Though it seemed a little strange to go to a party for someone he barely knew, Asher had accepted the invitation.

Now, he was riding the metro towards El Marg, sandwiched on a bench between an old man holding a small girl on his knee and a young man with a cap and torn jeans blasting music on one of the many Chinese produced Iphone look alikes that could be bought off the street for ridiculously low prices.

Asher had always had always had mixed feelings about the metro. On the one hand it was extremely cheap and in a city where transportation could be incredibly unreliable, its trains usually ran on time. Yet he loathed the tight spaces and throngs of people that could cram inside the metal. The heat, the smell of bodies and clothes smothered in calone and perfume mixing with sour body odor of those who couldn’t afford to hide their scent, bony elbows prodding you from one end, bulbous bellies jostling you from another, the hoarse cries of peddlers selling anything from newspapers to hair clippers as they walked back and forth across the cars. It could be too much for a sensitive mind.

Thankfully, tonight the trains were fairly empty and Asher wondered if it had anything to do with the debate between Alaa Al Aswany and Ahmed Shafiq that was going to happen on Nile TV tonight. The meeting between Egypt’s most famous contemporary writer and one of the most prominent members of the country’s establishment was something Asher was going to regret missing. A chance to see Dina though wasn’t something he could waste.

As the train arrived at El Maadi station, Asher brushed off the red dress shirt he wore at semi-formal occasions and emerged from the car. He crossed the open plaza and gave his ticket to one of the metro line employees in his blue uniform. From there it was just a short walk from the station to Dina’s cousin’s home.

Since he was still about 20 minutes early, Asher decided to take a brief walk around Maadi Square and the surrounding streets. One of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Cairo, Maadi always seemed a world away from the Cairo Asher saw every day when he turned off of his street in Dokki. It was one of three areas of the city where one could walk on the sidewalk uninhibited by stalls, chairs belonging to ahwas, and scattered piles of garbage. The trees and ritzy cafes and restaurants added to the sense that this was somewhere other than the Egypt of the sprawling slums of Imbabah or the simple white and red brick huts of the Nile Valley. Most of Asher’s Egyptian friends and colleagues came from neighborhoods like this, raised in large villas or spacious apartments guarded by police officers with Kalashnikovs or private security guards. It was one of the reasons he had valued his friendship with Kareem so much.

He meandered around the streets for about fifteen minutes, waving away the pleading honks of taxis as he rounded a few smaller roundabouts. Then, as he came around Gamal Street, he spotted a group of unveiled women in glossy suits and dresses walking down Amir’s street. He tagged behind them arriving at the gate to his home. The seal on the face of the gate, two Pharaonic style falcons holding up a red sun with a Coptic cross in the center, was exactly as Dina had described it.

He passed by the gate and entered the front door after the ladies. As with a lot of past parties he knew absolutely none of the well dresses men and women mingling and joking in the salon. Another precedent was soon set as his one connection at the party, Dina, was nowhere to be seen. She often had a habit of showing up late and even though Asher was usually tolerant of ‘Egyptian time’ her tardiness was something he found incredibly irritating.

Unsure of which people he could talk to until Dina arrived, Asher got himself a cup of tea and leaned against a wall besides an oil portrait of an effendi. The plump, mustachioed man in his fez cap and vested suit brought a kind of grandfatherly comfort. Asher stood for sometime beside the painting, trying his hardest to ignore the curious stares of some of the other guests and the inaudible whispers that followed them. One person, a middle aged woman in a red dress with a goiter, approached him. They exchanged brief introductions and after mentioning he was a friend of Amir and Dina, the woman a distant aunt named Ibitism, said she would go and fetch Amir. Asher wondered if Amir would even remember him after so much time but he knew that wouldn’t matter. Even if he had no memory of him, Amir would pretend well enough to make it seem as if he did.

A few minutes passed and after Ibitism failed to return, Asher decided to move from his spot by the portrait and head outside for some air. He took another sweep of the room before finding his way to the backyard. He stole a lawn chair from a pair of a young men on the veranda, whispering to each other about what he could guess was some piece of family gossip, and put it down on the grass. He sat down as he watched a group of kids chasing each other around the grass. Asher contently watched the horseplay until he drained the last piece of tealeaf from his cup. He had just gotten up and was about to head inside when a familiar face stepped out.

“Oh, there you are!”

Amir, who liked to keep his face a little bristly, pulled out a cigarette as he spoke. His hair seemed shorter than the last time they had met and his thin face had gained a little extra fat. His stout nose, a trait of the family, was identical to Dina’s.

“I’m sorry; I hope you weren’t looking for me.” Asher said.

Amir shook his head as he lit up.

“No problem.” He answered, stepping down onto the grass. “I got to chatting with my aunt about something else.”

They stood for a while on the grass, chatting. Asher, in a somewhat unusual role for him, facilitated the conversation. He talked about his work and how he was planning a trip to Siwa later in the year.

“It’s a beautiful place,” Amir said. “I went there on my honeymoon. There’s nothing like an oasis and the desert.”

“How is your wife by the way?” Asher wondered; he had never actually met Julianna.

“She’s well.” Amir replied dropping his finished cigarette into a garbage can. “She’s not very eager to move but it’s best for the children.”

“I understand,” Asher said.

            His mind turned back to the house as one of the kids opened the backdoor and went inside.

“Do you know if Dina is here?”

“Oh, yeah, she called me about five minutes ago; she said she was going to be late by about an hour.”

Asher nodded and shook his head. Amir smirked.

“You really want to see her again, huh?”

Asher felt slightly embarrassed. He hoped he wasn’t blushing.

“Of course, she’s a very good friend.”

Amir chuckled and pulled out another cigarette.

“I know, she values you.”

Those last three words made Asher want to change the subject.

“So, can I ask you, why are you leaving?”

Amir’s eyes widened.

“It’s pretty obvious isn’t it?”

            Asher shrugged.

“Egypt’s in a very unpredictable place and since my kids have US citizenship we’re taking advantage of it while we can.”

“You have a life here. I’m sure it must be hard to give it all up?”

“Definitely, but a gate has been opened and this country is being flooded and I don’t know if the waters are going to drown us or bring us new life.”

“Are you talking about the Ikwhen?”

“Yeah. I never loved Mubarak. I saw what he and his thugs did at the Battle of the Camels but I can’t see anything here anymore. We, the Orthodox, the Copts, we’ve been here for over three thousand years but I don’t think we have a future here. All I see when I try to look ahead in this country are clouds…just clouds. The Muslim Brotherhood is just one of the darkest ones. If I were you, I would leave too.”

“You’re not me.”

There was a brief lull in the conversation. Inside, someone had started singing and a dozen or so people were clapping their hands to the beat and cheering.

“This is true…” Amir agreed. “You know, I’m impressed with foreigners like you.”

“Why?” Asher wondered.

“I don’t know how you can love this country so much. I couldn’t love Egypt if I wasn’t Egyptian.”
Even though he hadn’t said it, Asher knew it was true. He did love Egypt more than his home country.

“I don’t love America.” He said. “I never have that’s why I want to live outside of it.”

“Well, then I pity you; we have to love our homelands. It’s an obligation in this life.”

As Amir took another puff, Asher held his tongue as his thoughts bubbled; how could one be obliged to love something? He held off asking the question to Amir. He was looking off into the grass, indicating their conversation had come to an end as far as he was concerned.

“Let’s go back inside.” He said. “I’m sure Dina will come soon. Just make yourself comfortable.”

Asher followed the guest of honor back inside. Amir was soon swamped by a mob of relatives, giving Asher the chance to slip back to the buffet table. He grabbed a few pieces of basbusa, Egyptian honey cake, and made his way back towards the portrait. Since the center of the salon was now very crowded he had to make his way into another waiting room to skirt around. There, a half dozen people were watching the heated discussion between Aswany and Shafiq unfold. Asher, normally drawn to this sort of heated debate withdrew and entered made his way back to the portrait. What was keeping Dina so long?

He finished his cake and went for another cup of tea, checking the time on his phone again and again as the minutes past. It had been almost an hour and a half since he came. Incredibly irritated and frustrated Asher finally rang Dina’s phone. 9 rings later, the line opened; 10 minutes later he stomped out the door.

December 21^st 2010

I was invited by Kareem to a Christmas party at his friend’s home in Agouza. I had never been to a Christmas party in Egypt before. I invited Dina and a few other people at work to come but no one accepted. I wonder if Kareem could have convinced them; he’s usually the more charismatic and persuasive. I don’t know how he does it but he can convince people to do anything.

In any case, we went to his friend’s house at around 9:00 in the evening. I brought along my new flatmate, Peter, as sort of another ice breaking event. We weren’t on time but we were earlier than anyone else. His friend Ryan is a Canadian who’s been living in Egypt for over 6 years. He’s even become a Muslim, a self-styled Sufi. Sweet guy, very well read, fantastic Arabic though he looks like he’s eaten more than his fair share of Canadian bacon…hmmh, bad fat joke, will need to do better next time.

Most of the other people showed up at about half past. It was a mixed group, foreigners and Egyptians; I talked to a nice African American girl that Kareem introduced me to. He knows my taste; too bad she wasn’t interested.

I ate and drank a lot; I think a few pieces of feteera and four Sakkara Golds. Ryan had made pies and cake too. They were scrumptious. I ate two pieces as I listened to him and Ryan discuss religion in Egypt. Both are big admirers of Nasr Abu Zeid, the scholar who tried to apply reasoned analysis of the Qur’an and was forced to leave Egypt when he got too much pressure from conservative Islamists. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying his philosophy and story but that’s what I gathered. Kareem sensed I was a little out of my league on that topic so he switched to history. It gave me a chance to discuss the impact of British colonialism on modern Egypt. It was a good boost to my ego when Ryan complimented me. Pathetic, I know, but I’m trying to work on my self esteem, honest.

After our chat we played a Christmas trivia game. By some strange stroke most Egyptians ended up on one team, while most of the foreigners, who were mostly Westerners, ended up on the other. The game probably would have had a different feel had Kareem known any Copts. Needless to say, the Egyptian team didn’t do very well. However, the sore egos went away once Kareem pulled out several spray cans of white party foam and started dousing everyone. It was a mad and hilarious half hour as everyone grabbed a can and started spraying each other white. The girls seemed to really get into it.

People began to stream out after the synthetic blizzard. Peter got friendly with a fellow Brit named Monica. I found her bag on the table when I got home tonight. The black girl, Tiffany, managed to get lucky too. She left with Abdullah, one of Kareem’s friends from Imbabah. Egyptian men seem to have natural sex appeal to westerners. It’s a pity the sense of exotic eroticism doesn’t seem to go the other way around too often.

I stayed behind and cleaned up the alcohol. Kareem and Ryan joined me too, though they abstained from drinking; religious reasons. The biggest surprise came around 1:30 when Kareem said he was joining an activist group. Kareem’s not usually one to talk about politics. I asked him why he had decided to get involved. His answer was, many Egyptians were getting fed up with the poverty and corruption in their country and felt it was time to make this known. He told us:

‘I’m thirty years old and I’ve done nothing with my life. We keep getting squeezed and squeezed each and every day. One day all our patience is going to run dry. We can’t keep going like this forever. I think, the day is coming when we can write our own story again.’

I don’t think I’ve ever heard an Egyptian speak that way about the powers that be.

٧  Seven ٧

Thoroughly pummeled by Alaa Al Aswany and facing a new surge of protests on Friday, Ahmed Shafiq’s resignation was seen as another victory for Egypt’s revolutionary youth. Another symbol of the regime was gone; another comrade of Mubarak’s forced out of political power. The announcement on Thursday transformed the demonstrations in Tahrir the next day. They went from being a protest to a celebration and a call to continue the struggle against the Old Egypt and members of the old regime.

Yet, like many Egyptians, Asher stayed away from downtown on that Friday. He spent the bulk of his morning reviewing his journals, scanning the internet for hotels in Siwa and wasting odd minutes with pointless YouTube videos. Between all this he had also managed to make a phone call and set up an appointment. He sat sipping Nescafe on the ebony couch while Peter sat at the dining table typing away on his macbook. They hardly spoke until around noon when the call to prayer shattered the calm and tranquility that pervaded the streets on a Friday morning. 

As soon as the first Allahu Akbar went out Peter raised his head and glanced towards the windows as if expecting to see the words floating by like little clouds.

“I’m thinking of going to Tahrir today,” he said, adjusting his glasses with thick black rims. “Do you want to come?”

“No thanks, I’m waiting for a friend. We’re supposed to meet in Agouza after the prayer.”

“Alright, no worries. How are you doing by the way?”

“Okay, all things considered.”

Asher appreciated Peter’s thoughtfulness. He had asked him off and on since he had gotten back from the funeral about how he was doing.

“Good, I only ask because you seemed to wake up really early this morning; I saw the light on under my door at about half past four.”

Asher sighed.

“I had a nasty dream,” he said. “Something about gunmen breaking into a hotel I was staying at.”

Peter winced; his green eyes glanced down and then up again.

“Probably all the stories about crime; bullocks if you ask me. The papers here devote whole columns to a single pickpocket and make it seem like every neighborhood’s being stripped. I can’t say Facebook helps much either.”

Asher agreed. In the past week or two, his Egyptian friend had been posting Facebook chains about all sorts of crime related items, from stories about different robberies, murders and rapes, to instructions on how to make your own pepper spray. Facebook had almost become a rumor machine. People were getting as much if not more of their news and information on events in Egypt from their friends as they were from websites. Twitter was very much the same way; though perhaps a little more accurate.

Asher’s thoughts on both convinced him to log into his accounts. He checked his newsfeed a minute or two after Peter left for the Square. Alone in the flat, Asher continued to work as the Imams ranted over their loudspeakers, filling the air with dozens of hoarse male voices that seemed to lie somewhere between angry and pained.

It was a little after one, as the voices started to fade away, that Asher got the call he was waiting for. After getting confirmation of their meeting place, Asher cleaned himself up a little and began the twenty minute walk from his flat to the ahwa in Agouza where he would meet his friend. He followed the overpass rising up over Meden el Dokki and then slipped under the Sixth of October Bridge. He walked along the edge of the street shaded by the bridge and flanked on either side by dozens of parked cars. A small group of young people in identical T-shirts were painting lines on the sidewalk curb. It was reminiscent of the days when people had voluntarily cleaned up graffiti and trash in and around Tahrir following Mubarak’s resignation.

When he arrived at Mahlouf, Ryan was waiting for him outside the café. He was still as large as he had been in December and just as pale. They each ordered a hookah, cherry flavored, as soon as they sat down at a small table near the entrance of the café.

“It’s been a while,” Ryan said, removing his small mouthpiece from its plastic bag. “I was wondering how you were holding up.”

“Didn’t have the best night, but doing alright,” Asher replied, pleasantly amused he could speak English without having to simplify it.

“Why?”

“Nightmare. So you stayed for the whole Revolution?”

“Yep, all 18 days. Agouza didn’t see the worst of the fighting, the looting wasn’t bad either. There was a bank on the edge of Mohandiseen near Ahmed Orabi that got robbed. The guys took a safe out and broke into it. There was about a million pounds worth of banknotes but since they didn’t know what it was they took the safe instead.”

Asher chuckled. He could believe it.

They puffed on their hookahs for a minute or two in silence.

“So what’s up?” Ryan asked. “Is there something going on?”

Asher smirked.

“Quite a few things….thanks for meeting me on short notice, by the way….I wanted to talk to you about Kareem.”

Ryan’s eyebrows shot up at the mention of his name.

“Okay,” he nodded, as smoke poured out of his nose. “What about him?”

“I know you two talked a lot about…well, big ideas.”

Drained from his restless night, Asher was having trouble being coherent.

“Big ideas?” Ryan asked.

“Religion, philosophy, and so on…”

“Oh, yeah we did chat about it sometimes.”

“Did he ever mention a project he’d been working on? Some kind of project for April 6^th?”

Ryan took a long breath on his pipe as he thought.

“Not that I know of. He didn’t talk about April 6^th with me, not really. I would have thought he’d have told you. You were much closer to him than I was.”

“You’d think so,” Asher said, realizing in that moment that Ryan hadn’t gone to Kareem’s funeral. “But Kareem didn’t really mention his activities or responsibilities to me.”

“Why are you asking, anyway?” Ryan wondered, proceeding to shoo away a small dirt choked girl who emerged from the street to sell her bags of tissues.

Asher waited to speak until the girl had given up and departed.

“About two weeks ago, the day before his funeral, Ayman gave me a flash drive that Kareem wanted me to have. He said it was important that I see what was on it.”

“Well, what was on it?” Ryan asked.

Asher swallowed and looked back at the TV in the rear of the café. It was broadcasting images of Tahrir. The tiny dark heads and vibrant colored T shirts made the crowd look like grains of ainis floating in a cup.

“I haven’t looked at it yet,” he said, glancing at the TV.

“Oh, OK.”

There was a long silence before Asher looked back from the TV. By then his coals were being replaced.

“Does that seem odd to you?”he wondered.

“What?” Ryan asked as he scanned his emails on his iPhone.

“That I haven’t looked at the files on the drive yet?”

“Honestly, I couldn’t say,” Ryan said, looking up again. “Is it strange to you?”

Asher realized he had made a very awkward stumble in the conversation. He had wanted Ryan to be curious enough to draw his answer out of him. He had succeeded, but now he felt insecure.

“I guess so; I have been distracted by a lot of things since I got back but….I guess….I couldn’t look at it.”

“Why?” Ryan asked, leaning in on the table with his soft, hairy arms.

“I guess I don’t know what he might be getting me into. That bothers me. If it’s something I have to take over ….well, I just don’t know if I can see it through. I’m afraid I’d fail.”

Ryan seemed to understand.

“Kareem did have a way of getting himself into tight places,” he agreed. “He got out of them though. I don’t know why he would leave you to finish something that he thought you couldn’t handle, if he really does have some unfinished task to complete.”

Asher thought he agreed. Since the afternoon was wearing on, they ordered two glasses of mango juices and sipped them for a while. They talked business as well as about the best places to find shisha tobacco in Cairo. Ryan was a connoisseur, which probably explained why his two front teeth were bright yellow. They parted ways as soon as their glasses were empty. Asher opted to walk under the bridge to the Corniche. He crossed the road and leaned on a guard rail for several minutes by the Nile, watching feluccas, sail boats, cruise up and down the river. The laterna sailing boats could cruise back and forth with ease, riding the current as it flowed north or swept by the wind as it blew south. Those were the elements in Egypt, he thought, always pushing in opposite directions. 

Having had his fill of the breeze and the water, Asher walked along the sidewalk and picked up a pair of shawerma sandwiches from Naema. The shredded beef dissolved in his mouth as he ate on his walk back to Dokki. On the way he stopped by a peanut shop along Dokki Street. He scanned the piles of nuts, almonds and seeds stacked neatly into tall piles in the front of the store and bought a sleeve of cashews. His favorite treat, chocolate covered peanuts, was no longer available, apparently because chocolate had gotten too expensive for many shop keepers since the Revolution.

He finished the pack around Dokki Square and made his way back to his apartment. He said hello to Ismail at the door and rode the elevator up to his floor. He was searching for the key to his door when his mobile started ringing. He let himself in and then picked up the phone. As soon as he heard the voice on the other end he wished he had thought to check the caller ID.

“Asher?”

His lips remained closed.

“Ash, this is Dina.”

He knew; he didn’t answer. A deep, static filtered sigh filled his ear.

“Ash, if you’re there, please say something.”

Asher leaned against the wall. His mind was void of any thought or feeling.

“Ash…please I want you to be okay. I’m not trying to hurt you. What I told you last night is true; this took me completely by surprise, but it is the best thing for me. You must know that’s true. You must want me to have the best.”

Asher imagined where she was calling from. The polished bathroom of a busy café? Underneath the steps of her church in Maadi? In her room at her parent’s home? Even in all his bitterness, he couldn’t help but remember her as anything other than beautiful.

“Okay,” She finally said, “I’m hanging up now. Please, call me when you’re ready to talk. I want to talk.”

The line closed and Asher went back to his computer; once again, he left the flash drive on his desk collecting a few more particles of dust.

٨  Eight ٨

“Don’t think I won’t do it. I will beat you with this ruler.”

It was, a not too unusual of the kind of lunch ‘conversation’ at Emblem. A few minutes’ earlier three chickpeas had bounced off of Mustafa’s gelled hair, having been hurled from the direction of Rasha’s desk. What followed was a series of quasi-flirtatious jibes between the two, which had finally resulted in Mustafa grabbing one of the metal rulers he kept in his desk. Now, lauding over Rasha’s desk, he was grinning with boy-like inhibition. Rasha, for her part, kept her eyes glued to her monitor pretending that she was above the little game she was involved in.

These sorts of playful games, which sometimes bordered on what Asher saw as a strange kind of masochism, were very common at Emblem during lunch times or breaks, which were not set during a specific time. It was a way to break the tension of work but it was an outlet for the many other kinds of tensions Egyptians had to deal with on a daily basis as well. Asher had always marveled at how loudly and passionately Egyptians could be at almost any time of the day. He guessed it was because the pressure of work, society, religion any source of authority really, was never completely gone.

Asher felt those pressures sometimes too, rather he felt the energy it sometimes created in his friends and colleagues, but he had never been very enticed by these sorts of games and decided to abstain.

As Rasha struggled to keep Mustafa from ‘beating’ her Asher gladly swung his attention back to his monitor. He had been reading Al Masry Al Youm’s article on the previous night’s events; the head office of Cairo’s State Security branch, the secret police force, had been stormed by a group of demonstrators during the night. They had subsequently made off with a number of top secret documents and materials. Some human rights activists had apparently found their own files among various desks and cabinets. Asher wondered what it would be like if the CIA’s headquarters in Langley were overrun in this way.

With Rasha and Mustafa’s exchanging loud remarks again, Asher relented and took his kofta sandwich into the buffet room. He took a seat in the small kitchenette where the office boys, the young male service staff, were eating a hearty meal of fool, bread and cheese. Asher declined their offer for him to join them though he couldn’t dissuade Khaled, the courier for the financial department, from trying to strike up a conversation.

“Asher,” He smiled, his white teeth contrasting with his dark Nubian skin. “What do you think about Gaddafi?”

Asher hated it when Khaled asked him these kind of questions; it was just the set up for the same joke. Still, Asher always answered him.

“I think he’s probably insane.” He said. “I think he needs to leave so his people can find the chance to have a better life. I don’t think he will though.”

“Well Gaddafi is my friend.”

Asher rolled his eyes.

“So is Netanyahu, and Obama. You say they’re all your friends.”

Khaled laughed.

“No, no America is not my friend. They kill innocent people all over the world. I love that Mubarak is gone, soon they will be too. You are okay though, really.”

Asher never really knew when Khaled was trying to play with him or seriously convince him of his views. Because of this he had stopped trying to strike up conversations with him and tried his best never to speak to him. His smile and laugh were masks.

“Can I ask you a question Asher?” Khaled wondered.

“Go ahead.” Asher replied.

“Do you like Muslims?”

This was the Salafi in him; Asher was sure

“Of course I do.” He said. “There are some that are bad and some that are great. Most are in the middle and I’m okay with that.”

Khaled shook his head and lowered his eyebrows.

“No, that’s not true.”

“It’s not?”

“No; Muslims are the best people in the world. We are truthful, and righteous and pure. We follow God’s teachings.”

Had someone told him before he moved to Egypt that there were some people in the country who thought and spoke like this Asher would have probably assumed they were being a bit ethnocentric. Now, he had grown accustomed to hearing these sorts of toeing the party line statements.

“Yes, you’ve told me this, many, many times. So you never sin?”

“What?”

“You never do anything wrong?”

Khaled laughed again. It was amazing how that laugh could make Asher feel like he was the one making ridiculous statements.

“No, anyone who sins is not Muslim.”

“So, no Muslim, out of 1 and a half billion people on the planet ever sins?”

“I never said that.”

Asher shrugged and took another bite out of his kofta. He hoped that was the end of the conversation. He was seriously thinking of moving to the production studio where Neveen usually ate.

“If I ever sin,” Khaled continued. “Than I am no longer a Muslim but when I turn to the truth path after sinning, I am a Muslim again.”

Asher thought for a moment.

“Isn’t that like saying before a judge that you were a criminal when you stole a TV, but now that you aren’t stealing it and sorry for what you did, you’re no longer a thief?”

Khaled’s smile sagged a little. Asher decided he could finish his sandwich at another time. He stood up to leave.

“Asher,” Khaled said. “One more question. Do you think the US going to help the rebels in Libya is good?”

“It’s not just the US.” Asher clarified. “France England and Italy pushed for it too.”

“I know,” Khaled said. “Don’t be so sensitive. Me, I know this intervention is just like Iraq, it’s all about oil and then they’ll just sell the oil to Israel. I just want to know what you think?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure yet.”

Khaled shook his head and chuckled again. The other office boys weren’t paying much attention.

“Why do you do that?” He asked; again acting as if Asher had just spilled something all over the floor. “You always say I’m not sure to questions or you give an answer that’s never sure. You never say anything is right or wrong.”

“I think truth is usually very complicated and I don’t want to tell people I have an answer before I understand what’s going on. You can’t say something as large as a military intervention in Libya is right or wrong based only on what an old man with a hairy face from Upper Egypt or Saudi Arabia says.”

Asher hadn’t lost his temper; he hadn’t shouted or screamed or waved his hands like some of his colleagues might have. He had used some unusually strong language and indirectly struck one of the few institutions Egyptians never questioned. The other office boys had looked up from their meals and were staring at both Khaled and him with renewed interest. Khaled seemed to sense he had them behind him.

“So you’re for the West in Libya?”

“I’m for Libyan’s getting a new and better life; just like I’m for Egyptians getting a better life. I guarantee you, though, if we hadn’t gone into Libya you’d be here now asking why the West didn’t bother to save the people of Benghazi or why we didn’t help to stop Gaddafi when we could of. But I’m done; I need to get back to work.”

Asher turned and left; he didn’t pause as Khaled called out to him. He couldn’t leave fast enough to escape his words.

“The truth is very simple! All we need to do is follow it!”

Having already endured a sleepless and thoroughly depressing weekend, Asher’s exchange with Khaled added another shot of melancholy to his day. It was a sensitive thing, being a foreigner in Egypt during such a time of change, and being an American brought its own kind of unique and poignant pressures. He tried to get his mind off of what had just happened and threw himself back into work. By now, Miriam and Mustafa had sowed their oats for the day.

By the time 5:30 hit, Asher was still agitated by the exchange. He wondered if he had overreacted if the main source of his anger were his conversations with Dina. His thoughts had been completely muddled since she had called him again Friday. He wondered if he should call her again, see if they could meet up in person to discuss everything. The moment he touched the receiver on his desk phone however his heart went cold again. He couldn’t hear her voice again; not for a while.

He continued sorting through old files and scouring the internet until 6. He shut down his computer, left the office in the hands of Mustafa and made his way to the lift. He was waiting with his arms behind his back when Karen emerged from her wing. She was carrying a sheet of plastic color separation film for a two page advertorial they were going to publish in the next issue of one of their magazines.

After riding down together, she asked him if she needed a ride home. Asher said he wouldn’t mind and walked with her down the street to the primary school that was just around the corner. He got into her Mitsubishi, gently moving the rattle of Karen’s two year old Sam to the dashboard and waited for Karen to get settled. She had very thick bags under her eyes as he turned on the ignition and pulled out into the street; assisted by the owner of nearby locksmith. Asher had always admired how late and how early she worked.

“You seem beat.” He commented.

Karen waved her finger and clicked her tongue.

“Never,” She said. “Just pooped.”

Asher chuckled.

“There’s a word I haven’t heard in a while.”

Karen smiled as they squeezed their way between a boy pushing a cart of vegetables and a black and white taxi. They drove another 100 meters or so until they were snagged by traffic just around the corner from Shaheen Street.

“Oh, did you follow up with Sandra at Gamalsaya concerning her quote for the company profiles?”

Asher shuddered.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, I did; No I didn’t.”

“Alright, don’t worry about it. Just send it out tomorrow.”

She honked at the microbus in front of them; no avail.

“Sorry.” Asher said; sensing tension.

“Don’t worry about it.” She replied. “You just forgot. You were a little off your game today anyway, it happens.”

“More than usual?”

Karen shook her head; her blond hair was beginning to standout even more in the fading light.

“Is it really so hard to believe you’re a decent worker?”

Asher sighed. They’d had similar sorts of conversations like this before. Asher had a tendency to make mountains out of mole-hills or any slight bulge on an otherwise smooth surface. It was hard for him not to get down on himself when he made even small or incremental mistakes.

“You’re not the best Account Executive that’s for sure, but you’re not the worst, not by a long shot. Give yourself a rest.”

Karen’s reassurances were welcome; Asher was doubtful they would stick.

“Thanks,” He said. “To be honest I was distracted today….something personal.”

The microbus’ scraped white back finally lurched forward. Karen followed suit.

“You want to tell me about it?” She asked as they sped through another side street that Asher had never seen before on his multiple walks through the neighborhood.

Asher always felt some kind of apprehension before he spilled things to Karen. It always seemed a bit inappropriate. The truth was, he needed to let his troubles out. They’d been distilling inside him for far too long.

“Someone I care for very deeply,” He began after a few false starts. “just got engaged.”

Karen nodded keeping her eyes focused on the road as a pair of men on a motorcycle passed them on the left with a bundle of metal wiring on the passenger’s lap.

“Is this anyone I know?” She wondered.

Asher knew Karen would probably know sooner or later who he was referring to once news got out through the grapevine. Still, his anxiety kept him from saying her name.

“Yeah, but I’d rather not say.”

“Understood.” Karen replied.

Asher could tell from her brief reply she already knew who he was talking about.

“Do you know who her fiancée is?”

Asher briefly glanced out the window at the sidewalk. They were moving fast now so fast he could only glance brief moments clearly. The grin on a toddler as he chased a soccer ball through the street, the melancholic resolve in the face of a lumbering old woman as she dragged home another basket of pasta and cheese, the dust smeared cheeks and drained dark eyes of a laborer as he smoked from an unfinished second story structure.

“Asher?”

“Sorry,” He answered. “I’ve never met him. His name is Bassem and apparently he’s a sales manager at Siemens.”

Karen nodded; they were beginning to near Tahrir Street.

“That’s impressive. How did you find out about this?”

Asher appreciated Karen’s dispassionate tone of voice. It made him feel as if she was listening with purpose.

“From her. I wasn’t sure what to say about it when she told me. I still don’t know.”

The car pulled out on Tahrir Street just after the Taza Restaurant. A woman in niqab tapped on Karen’s window to ask for food. She held her small baby up, dressed in a sleeveless red and white dress, to gain more sympathy.

“If you feel like it,” Karen answered. “Say congratulations and let that be it. Obviously, you two don’t have a future.”

Asher could feel a small slit appear on his heart the moment the words penetrated his ears. Still, he didn’t let his new pain show.

“I’m sorry kid.” Karen told him as they inched their way towards Dokki Square. “Everyone has to go through this at some point.”

“No, ‘there’s more fish in the sea speech’?”

“I figure you’re not ready to a cast a line just yet.”

Asher smiled again.

“Clever.”
“Have to be; CEO, kido”

Asher was feeling his age.

They pulled off beside Cinema Tahrir; a pair of girls in bright yellow hijabs and tight fitting tops and long skirts stood waiting on the steps. Asher reached for the door handle and prepared his goodbyes.

“One sec.” Karen said. “I have some news?”

Asher placed his hand on his knee and gave Karen his full attention. For the first time he noticed the stress lines on her forehead. There were so many that he wondered if there was one for every year she had been the head of Emblem.

“I’ll be leaving the company and handing over my position to a new manager. My family’s moving stateside.”

Somewhere, as is passed up through his esophagus, Asher’s aggravated groan became melancholic laughter.

Karen ignored it.

“It’s the best for the kids. I haven’t made an announcement at the company yet I wanted you to know ahead of time in case you had any special concerns.”

“What does that mean special concerns?” Asher wondered.

Usually Karen was much clearer when she spoke.

  

My Name is Woman

My Name is Virtue

My Name is Honor

My Name is Pride

Who are you to take away my pride with rubber gloves and Latin words?

Who are you to steal my honor behind plastic curtains and men in fatigues?

What law of God and man allows my virtue to be pierced by your sanitized hands?

What, oh man, is woman to you?

Woman is the pride you crave in your own spirit.

Woman is the deepest threat to your own honor.

Woman is the vessel of virtues your own soul lacks.

Woman is but the name of your own unfulfilled dreams.

Doctor, Professor, keep your hands away.

Soldier, Captain, do not lift the veil you put upon me.

Sheikh, Mufti, judge me not by the witness of those who do not see truth.

God, Allah, allow my shame to be shared by those who shame me.

Grant the miracle I crave, oh Lord.

For sanitized hands to be infected.

For gloves to be blotted with the darkness.

For batons and tasers to crumble.

For Man to suffer the same humiliation as I.

As I, as I, as I

            My Name is Woman.

My Name is Virtue

My Name is Honor

My Name is Pride

For Samira Ibrahim

٩  Nine ٩ 

There was something always a bit overwhelming about being in mosque for Asher. The space, the vacancy, the devotion to symmetry in its pure simplicity; it was all so beautiful to behold in a place like the El Hussein Mosque where Asher sat waiting for his Muslim colleague to finish his prayer. Even if one wasn’t enthralled with the concept of God or religion, Asher was sure only the most emotionally stunted cynical atheists could be unmoved by the artistic and architectural splendor that one of the world’s monotheistic faiths had produced.

It was a Thursday night and it was time to untangle a bunch of knots in the stomach. News had been trickling out about the virginity tests the army had carried out on female democracy demonstrators the previous day after a mob of thugs and military policemen stormed the Square in unison. This was the day after Copts had clashed with Muslims in Moqattam over the burning of a church in nearby Helwan.

Needless to say, it had been a hell of a week; if there was any place to find respite it was El Hussein. A small group of his colleagues (Nadya, a designer, Mustafa and a new colleague, Malak) had invited him to go with them on their weekly outing. Nadya was waiting outside while Mustafa and Malak performed the last prayer of the day, Ishaq, before the marble alcove at the front of the prayer hall that marked the direction of Mecca. While they and a dozen others prayed, other men filed into the mosque while more men sat towards the back reading or memorizing the Qur’an or Tafsir commentaries. A few of El Hussein’s many beggars or homeless slept near the back.

The most interesting group of people in the mosque though, by far, was a small group of Sufis sitting just in front of the entrance to the shrine that supposedly held part of the remains of Mohammed’s grandson. The men, all wearing orange prayer caps, sat cross legged in a wide circle. Representing different ages, from youths to old men, they turned their faces to the left and right in unison, reciting a Sufi chant or dikhr that Asher was unable to make out. Another member stood outside the circle, beating a tabla drum and filling the mosque with percussion. When they had first spotted the group, Mustafa told Asher how the Sufis had been coming to the mosque every Thursday to perform this ritual. It was particularly important, he said, since they had been banned from coming here when Mubarak was still in power.

Fascinated by their unorthodox ritual, Asher watched the contentment on the faces of the men as they lost themselves. He continued watching until Mustafa and Malak finished the last round and came walking back to him. Together they crossed the emerald carpet and made their way towards the door to pick up their shoes. Malak, a husky Muslim designer in his early thirties, reached the desk and shoe racks first and paid for him and Mustafa too. They had almost finished putting on their shoes, when a lanky man in a long white galibaya knocked against Asher’s shoulder. Without removing his shoes, the bearded man swept into the mosque, his red and white kefeyah wrapped around his face with untied ends flapping behind him as he headed straight for the Sufi circle.

The doorman called out to him to come back to remove his footwear, but his voice was quickly drowned out. The bearded man soon unleashed a raging torrent of insults and castigations against the Sufis as Asher and friends watched transfixed.

“What you’re doing is an illegal innovation!” he cried, his voice reverberating against the stone pillars and dangling chandeliers that lit the prayer hall. “This is the practice of infidels or idol worshippers! The Prophet Mohammed forbade that anyone should worship him or his family! You are non-believers!”

He continued at length for some time, even after a pair of Sufis split from the circle and tried to calm the man down by laying their hands on him and speaking in tones that were inaudible to Asher’s ears. The words kafr and haram, polytheist and forbidden roughly translated, were still flowing from his mouth by the time Nadya joined the group and asked them to move on.

The event stayed in Asher’s mind as they walked on the paved stone path that lay between the El Hussein Mosque’s massive walls and gothic-like windows and the dozens of stalls that lined the side opposite it.

“Who was that man?” Asher asked Mustafa. “What do you think about him?”

Mustafa gave a shrug, as he led the way back to the large plaza that dominated the mosque’s western façade.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just someone who didn’t like the Sufis.”
A little disappointed, Asher decided to drop it and hung back with Nadya, allowing Mustafa and Malak to lead the way.

A well rounded young woman who liked to wear bright hijab and dark framed square glasses, Nadya had been a designer at the company for eight years. She had a very sweet disposition. She had brought Asher a chocolate bar on his first day on the job and it had stuck with him. Since then, though, they had rarely talked and as they turned down one of the main streets of the bazaar, he found he had a hard time striking up a conversation. Their chat was odd small talk while Mustafa and Malak talked as if they had been raised on the same street.

Nadya was also, like most women Asher knew, a shopper and a browser. In a place like El Hussein’s Khan a Khalili, where everything from brightly painted ouds to inlaid mother of pearl chessboards, from T shirts, to shisha tobacco was at bartered prices, it was hard for many people to avoid taking at least a look. It seemed like every minute or so he was stopping with Nadya to browse another shop, listening again and again to the latest phrase to have entered the lexicon of the area’s notoriously persistent shopkeepers: How can I take your money today? Soon, Mustafa and Malak had stopped completely, leaning up against the edge of one of the walls by the glass façade of a perfume shop.

Finally, Nadya, realizing how she was holding up the group, abandoned her browsing binge. They broke away from the owner of a tea shop and rejoined their companions. Nadya was teased incessantly by Mustafa.

“What’s that ya Nadya?” he asked, pointing back to the last shop she had entered. “Were you going to look at every tea leaf?”

Nadya, who wasn’t always good with swift or clever replies, just smiled and shook her head, revealing her braces. Asher, perturbed only a few minutes ago, felt his frustration disappear. Nadya could be oblivious sometimes, but she was a genuine person.

“I hope I my shopping didn’t bother you?” she asked him, as they found themselves surrounded by the mosques lining the street.

Asher, smiled; his fondness for Nadya had grown.

“It was but I forgive you; I’m sure you’ll still get into heaven.”

Nadya laughed; Asher wondered how many people in Egypt would have understood that he was joking.

They wandered the many narrow side-streets of the Khan for about an hour. They were squeezed between a myriad of individuals. Between desperate vendors and the greetings in various languages that they used to establish a foreigner’s identity, and their target western tourists in shorts, spaghetti straps and capris, carrying their goods in brightly-colored sports packs or trendy multicolored handbags resembling some sort of supposedly ‘indigenous’ design, were Egyptian families, fathers in dress shirts, belts and long trousers leading one or two women in hijab bearing children of every age. Beggars, a category that ran the gambit from scrawny boys and girls to lumbering oms or mothers with their dirt smeared galibiyas and nearly toothless mouths, were present in equal measure. Asher wondered how long the convergence of business, affluence, community and poverty had existed in these stone streets. Would they have looked so different in the time of the Mamluks or the Ottomans?

They emerged from the spider web of stone staircases and converged on another street. In front of them stood the façade of the mosque, dyed purple by bright spotlights that came on every night. The domes and minarets of the Mamluk mosques along the street shown brilliantly. The subtle curves in their design had always captured Asher’s attention.

“Beautiful,” he whispered, as the group stopped to snap a few photos on their phones.

It was the only word he could think of. Perhaps it was enough; perhaps not.

“I wish I knew more about them,” Nadya confessed. “I’m very ignorant of our history.”

“Most people are,” Asher said.

“Or what they know as history is just a myth someone’s trying to sell you.”

Malak, whose eyes had been glued to the closed gate of the mosque, turned towards him. He had only spoken occasionally to Asher throughout the night. He had been friendly but not eager, preferring to spend his time with Mustafa. Something, though, had grabbed him.

“Do you know Kareem Abdel Aziz?”

It was then that Asher remembered where he had heard that line on history. The question didn’t hit him like a stone or an arrow. It was more like a hard tap on the shoulder. His professional world and his private life rarely ever converged.

“Yes,” he said, as Nadya’s eyes swung from Malak’s wide face to his. “Really, you knew him too?”

“From Imbabah? What do you mean knew him?”

“He’s dead.”

Asher couldn’t believe how easy that was to say now or how it barely managed to raise any kind of feelings inside of him. Time could heal wounds, but could it cauterize them this quickly?

“Peace be upon him,” Malak replied, his face sagging suddenly. “I didn’t know.”

“He was killed during the Revolution.”

Nadya, who had begun to awkwardly check her Facebook on her blackberry the moment Asher had uttered the words, ‘he’s dead’, looked up and excused herself with a sympathetic smile. She tip-toed over to Mustafa, and Asher was left to explore this strange and seemingly implausible connection.

Malak, who had studied graphics at Ein Shams for a year before moving to Giza University, had met Kareem at a student run newspaper where they had both worked. Malak was in charge of developing a logo for the paper while Kareem was a part time contributor. They had met briefly over a tea break, and had become, as Malak put it, ‘close acquaintances’.

“We were friends but not close,” he said, looking over his shoulder at a young boy wheeling a cart selling hibiscus juice. “I remember him though, even after all this time. He had a unique soul and he spoke very firmly. I admired that a lot. It was a shame he wasn’t with the brothers.”

“Brothers?” Asher asked, though he was pretty sure who he meant.

“Muslim Brothers,” he said. “We could have used him. When I left that paper and joined another publication put out by the youth wing of the Muslim Brothers, I asked if he wanted to come with me. He said he couldn’t work for a group that didn’t believe in justice for everyone…he used that history line in our argument along with the Qur’an and tafsir.”

Asher was surprised when Malak began laughing, just as he was surprised to learn that Kareem had worked for a newspaper.

“You know, he didn’t convince me they were wrong, but I still respect him for arguing so hard.”

“So you are a Muslim Brother?” Asher surmised.

Malak chuckled, pointing his face to the ground.

“No, I’m a Salafi.”

He had been one for about three years. That was all Asher was able to hear before Mustafa swept down and carried them off deeper into El Hussein. Away from the El Hussein Mosque and the main souk, the areas became quieter and quieter. Certain streets, which Asher thought had been crowded only a few months earlier, were black and empty. The drop in tourism had a lot to do with it, no doubt. Apart from Russian and Chinese tour groups, who rumor had it weren’t scared of anything, foreigners (i.e. Westerners) had only dripped back into the market. Asher wasn’t the only one who felt aware of this.

“I don’t like this street,” Mustafa said. “It’s too empty.”

Nadya, who could be fairly tight lipped like Asher, spoke up. “People are scared to visit the country. They’ll come back after the referendum.”

Malak shook his head and whistled.

“We don’t need to count on them; we rely on foreigners too much. We need to be independent, strong, unified. We have a chance to make God’s law the center of our new country.”

“Under Hazem Ismail?” Mustafa jibed, making a reference to the conservative, ivory bearded Salafi TV host who had once famously declared that Pepsi stood for Pay Every Penny Straight to Israel, and Muslims should avoid the soft drink because it supported the Zionist cause.

Malak’s voice instantly changed tone.

“Inshallah,” he declared, raising his voice. “For 200 years we’ve been waiting for this moment. Now we have the space to vote Islam. We rightly guided ones won’t let that opportunity go to waste. Justice, God’s justice, will set us right. Islam is our only solution.”

“Not education?” Asher quipped from the back. “Not a diversified economy?”

Malak didn’t hear him or perhaps he pretended not to. He launched into what seemed like a well rehearsed lecture on American and Western support for Mubarak; how the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis had an economic plan that would make the country wealthy like Saudi Arabia.

It went on for almost the rest of the night with Mustafa speaking only a few times on certain subjects. Asher for the most part drifted away, losing himself in the architecture. He thought about all the groups of people who had come to Egypt over the centuries, outside cultures that had imposed their will on the country. Persians, Greeks from Alexander to Ptolemy to Cleopatra, Romans later Byzantines, Arabs such as the Tulunids from the Peninsula and the Fatimids from Tunisia, Ayyuibs from Kurdistan, Mamluks, the soldier slaves from Circassia and Turkey, Ottomans, French, an Albanian captain Mohammed Ali whose dynasty was overturned by the British who came to collect their debts for his and his children’s grand development projects.

Asher wondered; these pale thin women with blond hair who drove Egyptian men wild with Hollywood inspired fantasies, were these the new Mamluks of Egypt? Were these sometimes naïve and bumbling Westerners a last and fading occupation brought on by American consumerism?

That, Asher thought, was probably a step too far. Still, Malak had a point. Egypt, like any other country needed its independence so that it wasn’t exploited by more powerful countries as it had been so many times before. It was then Asher wondered what Kareem might have said about the whole affair.

١٠  Ten ١٠

The big day had arrived at Emblem. The entire staff, from the creative directors to the office boys had gathered in Karen’s office, spread out among her sofa and several desk chairs that had been carted in while the owner and chairwoman, Sallie, sat beside a humble and unusually uncomfortable looking Karen.

It seemed fitting to Asher that she had decided to make her announcement so soon after the results of the referendum on SCAF’s new constitution came out. A hybrid constitution that was supposed to be used until parliamentary and presidential elections next year, it had been universally opposed by his educated colleagues but had been approved by an Islamist backed landslide from poorer neighborhoods. It was amazing how the phrase ‘A vote for yes is a vote for Islam’ could carry so much weight.

Asher had thought no one else knew what was coming, but the moment Karen broke the news in her flawless Egyptian Arabic the staff absorbed it without making a sound. To him anyway, it seemed as if people had resolved themselves to carrying this new load. The burdens had been piling up little by little.

‘The price of bread is rising, police stations are still empty and their officers are too timid to enforce the law for fear of starting riots, unemployment rises as tourism slumps, protests continue in Tahrir and now our boss of 10 years is leaving.’ What to do? Just say malesh and carry on.

There was one question, though, on everyone’s mind. Who would be the new woman or man calling the shots from behind Karen’s desk?

“My replacement is Maha Sali,” she announced. Her eyes began to redden. Asher thought of reaching for a tissue. “She used to work for Dahshur Real Estate. She has a great deal of experience in management and I hope you’ll all join me in welcoming her when she arrives tomorrow. Unfortunately she couldn’t make it today because of a family issue.”

“Ya Karen,” Asmaa quipped. “I’m sure she won’t use Egyptian IBM.”

“Egyptian IBM?” Asher whispered to Mustafa, who was sitting next to him.

“Inshallah, Bokra, Malesh,” he said in Arabic before translating into English. “God willing, tomorrow and no problem.”

Asher was somewhat annoyed that Mustafa had translated the words for him; he knew what they meant.

The laughter and joking continued as one of the creative directors, a hefty grey haired Coptic man named Ibrahim, spoke up. His voice was as full as his midsection.

“You’re leaving at the right time, Karen,” he said with a smile. “You won’t have to deal with the army, the Brotherhood or the Salafis.”

His colleagues laughed again, but beneath his placid smile, Asher knew Ibrahim spoke from deep anxiety. He had been unable to come to work the day before because a gang of Salafis had been roaming his neighborhood threatening to abduct any Christian woman they found out on the streets. They had come out of the woodwork over the last few weeks with widespread rumors of abductions and kidnappings of Copts. In Egypt, humor often was a proper way to release pain and anxiety.

Karen could see this too. Asher was sure that was the reason her smiles seemed very thin.

“In all seriousness,” Ibrahim said, losing his grin, “it’s been such an honor working with you. For eleven years you’ve been guiding us and helping us. You’ve kept everything under control and have done everything to keep us going during bad times. But life is life and we have to change even if it’s hard. You and the way you ran things will be deeply missed, my dear. The Lord bless you.”

The heartfelt words were followed by a round of applause from around the room. Tears leaked from behind Karen’s eyes as Sallie put her hand on her. The crying and applause only lasted a minute before Sallie addressed the employees, giving a small speech about how the employees would continue to receive their salaries and benefits. It seemed a very lackluster way to end the meeting.

As the employees filed out the creative directors remained behind with Karen, Asmaa and Sallie to discuss future operations. Asher left the room and walked towards the the office that housed the designers. The production manager, Neveen, caught him and asked him to come into her office.

Married and in her later thirties, Neveen was still an attractive woman. She was also another long-timer, having been at Emblem for nearly 10 years.

“Asher can I ask you something?” she said, adjusting the tiny silver cross she wore around her neck.

Asher nodded.

“Go ahead.”

“Do you think we will be able to go on without Karen?”

Asher was stunned. That was the sort of question he should be asking her, not the other way around. In Egypt though, foreigners (Westerners) were stereotyped as being more intelligent in just about everything. Even young and inexperienced people like Asher were consulted on a variety of issues.

“Well,” he said, using the Arabic place filler yani, “I think so. Everyone here has been doing their jobs for a long time. We have creative people on staff. Yes I think we’ll be okay, even though it may be hard in the beginning to change.”

Neveen nodded and glanced over her shoulder at the calendar on her desk.

“Do you agree?” Asher wondered.

“I think we’ll have to share more of the workload,” she said. “Karen did so much for us, so much you don’t even know about. I wonder if we’re ready to carry those responsibilities?”

Asher knew she had a point. Karen was a micro-manager; she was constantly changing details in designs, content and even emails that he and other marketers sent out to clients. Still, he found it hard to believe that people who had been working that long with her wouldn’t understand how to keep their system going.

“I think we’ll be okay,” he reiterated, pausing to reflect on how this sounded almost like a kind of a mantra. “It just takes time. Change comes a grain at a time.”

“We hope,” Neveen said.

Asher could feel her apprehension but decided not to pursue it. He had to finish up some changes on a flyer with Nadya as soon as possible so he could leave work early. He had an exhibition to attend on the island of Zamalek. The fact that it was the end of the work week, Thursday, also added some incentive.

He managed to send off the PDF with the changes at 3:58, jump into a pair of trousers and a new collared shirt at 4:04 and take a taxi to the Safawy Culture Wheel. The Culture Wheel was an area just under the 26^th of July Bridge that hosted concerts and art displays. It was a focal point for some of Cairo’s young artists and musicians, an island of creativity next to the Nile, tucked away beneath the pandemonium of Cairo’s clogged and grimy streets.

It was here that some of Tamer’s photos were being displayed in an exhibition celebrating photographers from the January 25^th Revolution. Asher met his friend on the small footbridge that ran over the street. Tamer had gelled his hair back this time, making him look like one of the countless numbers of youths that sat on street corners practicing their cat calls on any female creature that walked by.

“5:05,” Tamer said, beaming as he often had since January. “Not bad.”

“I had a hard time crossing the street,” he explained.

“Well, Cairo was built for traffic, not for driving,” Tamer joked. “Don’t worry, though. No driver would ever hit a foreigner.”

Asher laughed; he realized it had been a while since he had done that.

Together, they descended the steps to the small grassy hill that bordered the Culture Wheel’s main exhibition hall. Several rows of boards had been set up parallel to each other. Each displayed ten photos from the Revolution taken by a different photographer. Tamer’s was the second to last on the right. Asher took a long look at each of the photos while Tamer left him to mingle with some of his other artistic friends.

Half the shots were very large and prominent close-ups of the faces of demonstrators. Tamer had always been drawn to faces; he had a particular fascination with facial lines. He had once said, each wrinkle in a forehead was a decade of life and troubles. If that was so, Asher guessed the older man and woman in two of his portraits had lived for close to a century.

Four of the other five photos had about the same impact as Tamer’s portraits. There was a shot from behind of a young boy in a white undershirt and shorts standing in front of a burning police lorry, clutching a flag in one hand while clinging to a stuffed rabbit with the other. The second was of a male demonstrator tending to the head wound of a young woman. The third was a shot of two soldiers sitting on an armored vehicle drinking tea with a group of vigilantes from the night of looting on the 29th. Asher recognized the bank they were sitting in front of as the branch of the Alexbank in Tamer’s neighborhood, Mohandiseen. The fourth was a shot of a young man beaming with joy as he fired a rocket into the air to celebrate Mubarak’s resignation.

The fifth and final photo was one of the most crowded. It was also Asher’s favorite. In the very background, through a cloud of teargas, he could make out the back of the manes of the lions on the Qsr El Nil Bridge. Standing on the pavement, just on the periphery of the cloud was a wall of riot police, linked shield to plastic shield like a Roman legion. There was but one break in the chain, a single officer, without helmet or shield, brandishing his baton in the air while at the very foreground an old bearded man with a cane and a stooped back hobbled off with a single plastic shield and gas mask.

It was a brilliant moment, beautifully captured. Asher turned to complement his friend on his achievement when he felt a second body next to him. Instead, he turned around and found a pair of hazel eyes and a nose stud twinkling back at him.

“Did I scare you?” the eyes asked.

Asher blinked twice and chuckled, finally noticing the face and body that the eyes belonged to.

“No,” he said. “I was just lost in this photo. Thanks for pulling me back to reality. That is, if reality looks this good.”

It was an awkward flirtation but the young woman, who soon introduced herself as Nermeen, understood and smiled. Her dark skin and slightly reddish hair contrasted beautifully with her white blouse and black jeans. Asher had been trying his hardest to push Dina’s engagement and Kareem’s thumb drive from his mind. He had failed and succeeded off and on for the last week. Now was the first time those thoughts seemed well outside the walls of his mind. Warmth flooded his midsection; his senses tingled.

“So are you Tamer’s American friend?” the distraction asked. “The one who loves Egypt?”

Asher chuckled; he was imagining how Tamer had bragged about him to her.

“I do love Egypt; it’s become like home.”

“It seems that way. Your Arabic is very good,” she commented. “How did you and Tamer meet?”

“We’ve known each other for about a year. He did some freelance photography for my company before the Revolution.”

“You were here for the Revolution?” she asked, seeming partly impressed.

The warmth in his stomach briefly evaporated. Asher contemplated fibbing and just saying ‘I was here when it happened,’ but his answer came up spontaneously, deep from within him like an unintended belch.

“I was only here for the first 6 days,” he confessed. “I left for Turkey and then the US afterwards on Feb 3^rd. I wish I had stayed, though. ”

Nermeen’s eyes flickered and went blank. Her face fell back slightly as her smile waned. Asher could tell he had shown too much. Hastily, he changed the focus of the conversation to her. Nermeen, a mutual friend of Tamer, was a freelance designer working on a Master’s degree in graphics. She had been helping him with some designs for a book he was planning to write with another photographer, a compilation of photos of politically themed street graffiti. The awkwardness Asher’s allusion had breathed into their conversation evaporated as Nermeen steered the conversation as she liked. Asher matched her every turn until Tamer, having made the rounds with his fellow artists returned to his two friends.

“Sorry for the delay,” he said. “How has Nermeen been treating you?”

Asher smiled and cocked his head slightly to the right; it was a gesture of thanks to his friend for this new meeting.

“Very well,” he said. “We were just looking at your photo. This really is a special one.”

Tamer smiled and put his hand on the edge of the image just in front of the old man’s bare head. He stared firmly, warmly, reservedly at the picture like a proud father admiring his son.

“This was just before we broke through. We rushed their line and they covered us with tear gas to drive us back. The old man must have grabbed the mask and shield as we ran back to get out of the cloud.”

Tamer adjusted his glasses and placed his hands inside his pockets.

“I thought my camera would get smashed so many times. It was worth having it there to get this photo though. To me, this is the revolution.”

Asher could see it. He could see it in the bony hands of the old man clutching the mask and the shield, defanging the serpent of the state.

Tamer left them again a short while later. Maybe he could sense the chemistry; Asher wasn’t sure. Either way, he was glad that he and Nermeen were alone again, allowing him the chance to move her away from the exhibition to the grassy area just in front of the Nile.

“Asher,” Nermeen said, after they had stood in silence for a while watching the water, “do you like Egyptian women?”

Asher, felt his center grow warmer. In Egypt, where virginity and ‘purity’ were valued in women, where many women’s dreams only went as far as wedding rings, where even a small joke or quasi-seductive smile could create a whirlwind of rumor and gossip, it was rare that a young girl would approach a man so openly; it was even rarer for a woman to initiate this kind of intimate conversation and reveal her desires.

“I like some of them very much.”

“You know we are difficult,” she said, leaning in a little closer.

“All women are.”

They laughed.

Asher leaned in a little closer; Nermeen ducked her head down, glancing back at the crowd of people mingling just a few meters away. They were alone in the dark, but they could still be spotted.

“I don’t usually like someone this quickly,” she said. “But I like you. I didn’t think I could like a foreigner like this. I’m glad Tamer mentioned how we could get along. I’ve had a hard time since my boyfriend and I broke up.”

“I’m glad too,” Asher smiled.

Asher usually tried to take things slower when it came to women. This time was an exception. Things were moving fast and he wanted them to speed up. He wanted…needed this dream to go on. Slowly, with a little hesitation, he reached out and stroked her hair. It sealed the deal. In a few moments they were sneaking away up the stairs of the Culture Wheel, heading for the nearest taxi. They should have said goodbye to Tamer but there was no time; they were being pushed along, swept away by a mutual yearning. There was nothing that could stop them.

They climbed into a cab and sped away through the wide and ritzy boulevards of Zamalek. The orange light of the street lamps illuminated Nermeen’s amber neck as they drove. Asher wished he could touch her then, the dissaproving scowl of their bearded taxi driver be damned. When they reached Dokki Square, Asher was so distracted by his sudden surge of desire he fumbled as he tried to find change for the cab. Nermeen managed to help him out, handing the driver a five pound note as Asher finally uncovered a few one pound coins from his back pocket. As he pulled out the last bit of their fare, his finger touched the glossy edge of a piece of hard paper.

Asher’s hormonal surge was temporarily repressed when he pulled the item out. It was an old postcard featuring a photo of the central courtyard of the Ibn Tulun Mosque. Its domed fountain, surrounded by barren empty space and bordered by high walls, contrasted sharply with the ziggurat shaped minaret that stood out prominently in the image. Though his memory could be poor at times, Asher was sure he had never purchased this card or placed it in his pants pocket. He turned the card around and saw a short sentence written in Arabic on the back. The handwriting was too fluid for him to make out.

“What’s wrong?” Nermeen asked.

Asher briefly contemplated asking her to translate the writing. He quickly decided against it. He had a feeling that whatever was written on the card would stop her from making it past the TNT building to his apartment building. He told her (and himself for that matter) that it was nothing and put the card back in his back pocket. He left it and any thought of it there until the next morning, thoroughly lost with Nermeen for the entire night as they poured their troubles into each other. He only went back to it after a beaming and still randy Nermeen had given him a goodbye kiss, squeezed his rear end and left to go back to her older cousin’s house where her parents thought she had been staying that night.

After washing the dishes from their breakfast, Asher put on his clothes, picked up the card and rode the elevator down to the first floor. He asked Ismail to read what was on the card. Ismail, who as luck would have it could read, said:

‘The struggle is yours too. You must embrace it.’

“Strange greeting, Mr. Ash,” Ismail commented. “Are you sure the friend who sent you this isn’t a little crazy.”

Asher laughed, masking the invisible worms that were stirring underneath his skin. Asher lied, saying he had just found the postcard on the ground. He returned to his apartment a minute later, trying his hardest to remember his fervent night with Nermeen. Somehow, though, his erotic memories couldn’t destroy the mystery created by the chalky stones of that mosque or replace the fourth word in that short, jolting message that was tugging at his heart, pulling him back to that grave in Imbabah.

١١  Eleven ١١

 

Asher had tried calling Ayman’s phone several times; he had tried sending him several SMSs asking for him to call him back. It had been almost two months since Kareem had been put to rest and it was the first time he was trying to contact his family.

Yet there was never a response. And none of Kareem’s old friends, Abdullah, Sami or Amr had seen their old basha’s younger brother recently. Asher supposed that Ayman’s prediction had come true and that he had been forced into working to support his mother and pay the rent for their flat. Asher could have dropped by the family home unannounced; he had a few times when Kareem was still alive. Somehow, though, he couldn’t bring himself to grab another cab and make the journey back to that narrow side street, to the grinning bawab, to the elevator, to the front door. That trip was just something he couldn’t grapple with.

So, he distracted himself, again spending several minutes out of every day studying the postcard and its strangely alluring message. The slurred script still seemed indecipherable to him, the anarchic letters blurring and weaving together like the work of a master calligrapher.

Unfortunately, Asher’s eyes couldn’t discover the answer in this bold script. He also couldn’t find it in the image. He had only one suspect, someone who had used language like this before and might be waiting for him to share in something that had been passed down to him.

He was unreachable and since Asher was not prepared to return to Imbabah, his only recourse was to go to the Ibn Tulun Mosque. As he rode from Dokki to Islamic Cairo in the back of a cab, Asher couldn’t help but imagine that he would find his answer waiting for him with arms folded against the mashrabiya as in the picture. Tucked away in the midst of sprawling brick apartment buildings and close to a burned out police station, the mosque had been built by one of Egypt’s earliest Muslim rulers. Asher brought along a guide book to fill him in on the historical details. It was impressive, spacious, reflecting Iraqi Samarran designs of its Iraqi born patron.

He wandered around the outer courtyard, tucked away between high brick walls that had once guarded the center of ancient Fustat. Yet even after he had left the outer courtyard and entered the four inner arcaded halls that surrounded the open courtyard and the domed ablution fountain, Asher’s mysterious postcard giver failed to step out from behind any of the dozens of stone columns that held up the ceiling. Asher scanned the entire mosque from top to bottom, scouring every cut and character in the decorative plaques that marked the direction of prayer, the simple alcove, the mihrab; he even walked out again and climbed the weaving steps of the ziggurat style minaret that looked down upon the courtyard, wondering if he could look down and see his man stalking him from the courtyard.

He tried searching for other clues but found none. There was nothing of Ayman here. Nothing of Kareem; at least nothing he knew of. The only thing he could see in the mosque was its grandeur, its wide and open halls and roof, how it seemed so strangely out of place in the row upon row of apartment blocks and satellite dishes. It was almost as if it had been stashed away amongst the urban sprawl, glossed over and largely forgotten.

Asher wondered if that was a metaphor for Kareem but decided that was too explicit. His last act in his investigation was to question the men standing outside the mosque. Neither of them had seen a boy resembling Ayman or had heard of Kareem. He left the mosque via another white taxi cab. The driver began reciting prayers and counting his prayer beads as soon as Asher sat down in the passenger seat. Asher was slightly bothered but only slightly. He hated being designated as a kafr; somehow, his status as a polluted person was strangely fitting. He returned home empty handed, buying a tissue off the women who sold knick-knacks with her three little daughters from a cardboard box on the sidewalk next to his building.

He returned to the flat and watched coverage of some of the new demonstrations in Tahrir. The 'Save the Revolution' protests had gathered a few thousand people in the roundabout. It was just one of many demonstrations that had been held since January, pressing the generals to lift emergency laws and release political prisoners they had detained and prosecute felool (former regime members). A few close up shots of men carrying dolls, effigies of felool, with nooses tied around their necks made Asher switch off his set.

He worked a full week with the rest of his colleagues, hearing brief snippets about how a larger protest was planned for that Friday to force the army to put Mubarak on trial for killing protesters. He also began to hear many more rumors about Karen’s new replacement, who had yet to introduce herself to the rest of the staff. There was some speculation that one of their larger clients, Orami, had handpicked her at Sallie’s insistence. It seemed a reasonable assumption since Sallie’s husband was also the brother of Orami’s CEO. Asher managed to ask Karen that week why Maha had failed to appear for over a week.

“She has family issues to attend to,” Karen responded, focusing her eyes on her red pen as she signed a form approving the printing of a new banner. “She’ll definitely introduce herself before my farewell party on Tuesday.”
As Asher left she added, “Take it easy, okay?”

Asher wondered who she was really speaking to. He smiled and nodded and returned to his desk. Rasha and Asmaa were talking with the accountant, Ramez, about the planned demonstration and the string of reported burnings of alcohol stores that had been blamed on Salafi vigilantes. Some were also demonstrating outside a Coptic Church, insisting the priest had imprisoned his wife there after she converted to Islam.
“First it’s a crime wave, now the Salafis come out of every corner and neighborhood,” Rasha commented. “Where were they when Mubarak was in power?”

“Don’t be afraid,” Asmaa insisted. “They’re just enjoying their new-found freedom like everyone else. I think they will quiet down.”

“Oh Lord, I hope so,” Rasha laughed. “I don’t want to wear one of the hijabs; they always looked so hot.”

Ramez, the small middle aged Protestant accountant of the company, who often wore plaid shirts and dark rimmed glasses, spoke up.

“They could be very strong, especially with the Ikwhen to help them. I have a brother in Upper Egypt. He says the Salafis in Minya blinded someone they thought was a pimp and burned down Sufi shrines in the hills around town.”
Asmaa shook her head.

“I swear to God, those men are not Muslims. They don’t represent the people.”

‘The people’. For some reason it stayed in the back of Asher's mind for the rest of the week until Friday, when he decided to ride the metro from Dokki to Sadat Station to see this latest demonstration himself. The sound and sight of a Russian made army helicopter circling the skies around downtown’s high rise hotels didn’t deter him, even if it did shake his skin and make him wonder if the military police would be striking that day. His fear quickly dissipated when he emerged from the underground and back into the Square. The crowd was far less fluid, compacted into tight packs around various stages and speakers. Asher grabbed onto a human chain of people pushing deeper into the center of the Square. He finally settled on standing on an elevated grate a few meters away from the KFC.

As he stood and watched, he noticed cracks in the mob, certain groups gathering at specific stages, particular speakers using language to draw their right kind of person. He saw bearded men in robes and prayer caps, Christians holding golden crosses above throngs of veiled women in hijab and unveiled girls with trendy shades and iPhones, Palestinian youths chanting for their own Revolution in Nablus and mustachioed men bearing posters boasting how they would march to Sharm el Sheikh and take Mubarak out of his villa by force if the military refused to act. He also witnessed the arrival of several army officers in uniform who had defied their orders to voice their support for the demonstrators’ demands.

As he witnessed the soldiers in black shades and tight fitting fatigues address the crowd, Asher wondered how deep the fault lines in the military and the crowd ran. Was Mubarak the only thing that could bring them all together? Was his sharp nose and dark beady visage the only face that could erase the lines and make only one stage in the crowd, one voice?

It was a rather sobering thought. He returned home at around 5:00 in the evening, just after the number of people in the square had started to decrease. He wondered later if he had heard the gunfire from his bedroom at around 3:00 in the morning when the army’s military police marched into the square and cleared it of demonstrators, firing warning shots as they went in with batons and plastic shields. The AJE news video, showing row upon row of army men in shimmering helmets charging down narrow streets at night towards the center of Tahrir, their olive uniforms bleached orange by the street lamps, was a strong sight, almost as much as the image of black uniformed riot policemen converging on the center in conjunction with their new army comrades.

Asher had missed the battle, if you could call it that, by ten hours. Somehow, he felt as if he had only missed it by a few minutes. He wasn’t sure if he felt disappointed or relieved that he had not seen the demonstrators hurling bottles and charging the riot lines firsthand. Both feelings had crawled their way up into his chest when he saw the image in the video of a military policeman, separated from his comrades, who was shoved to the ground, beaten and stripped of his body armor by a mob of demonstrators.

Asher tried writing a poem about the scene, as he had for Samira Ibrahim. Nothing came. His creativity was still stunted. His mind was too full, too burdened with images from the news, failures of the past and present, fears of the unknown. There was no empty space to breathe, no room for anything other than the emotional cocktail brewing inside him. It was enough to prompt him to buy a few beers and dislodge some of his more imbedded thoughts.

He spent an inactive and uninteresting Saturday scanning the web and briefly venturing out to search for a farewell gift for Karen. He settled on a pair of ankh earrings. They were a tad tacky; Karen would probably notice. It was the only thing he could think of though, and he doubted anyone else at the office would get her anything chicer.

He brought them to the office on Tuesday morning along with a pair of dress clothes. It was the outfit which made him feel the least exposed. His last project under Karen’s supervision was a tiny one. He had to check over the phone numbers and names on a set of business cards for the new CEO, who would, Inshallah, materialize that evening.

Asher had just finished inspecting the text underneath the Emblem logo at closing time when Karen emerged from her office and checked the cards over again herself. Miraculously, they were perfect.

“Good,” she said in Arabic. “Now come ride with me; the birds in my stomach are chirping.”

She later explained as they drove to the restaurant barge, that it was an old Egyptian saying for I’m hungry. Asher was largely silent as he rode along in his dress clothes. They had rented a luxury boat restaurant for the evening, just across from the embassy in Giza. It was a quasi-oriental themed boat, bobbing just opposite a barge carrying Gold’s Gym. Asher settled down with the rest of the staff, including the service staff, on a long glass table overlooking the river and the 6^th of October Bridge.

Asmaa had arranged with the staff ahead of time for their meal course. The waiters in their white shirts and black bow ties still seemed totally unprepared for the thirty or so people that invaded their floating dining hall. Pasta was served and Asher took a seat between Nadya and Malek. Karen sat further down with the creative directors. They were hunched over in intense conversation.

“They’re nervous about the new boss,” Nadya explained. “I think they’re afraid she’ll try and change the structure of the company. Karen kept a few people around that another boss probably would have fired.”

Asher drifted away from the conversation as his plate of pasta arrived. By the time he had finished, the other guests had started arriving, representatives from important clients, old friends from Karen’s AUC days, a few families from her church in Nasr City. It was a strong showing, a worthy showing for a woman who had so successfully dissolved into Egypt and was now being drained. Asher was sure she would make it in the US.

When his plate was cleared, he stood up and made his way around the room, occasionally stopping by the glass windows to look out at the Nile and the traffic that was momentarily streaming across the bridge. It was during the last of these brief interludes, after engaging in a short conversation with an Egyptologist, that Asher heard his name called. The voice was familiar yet only just so, like a breath of strong tobacco that had once tickled his throat but was now drifting away and dissipating into the air.

It took a full five seconds for his mind to acknowledge what his eyes saw: Dina standing in the center of the floor.

Asher had spent the better part of two weeks trying to forget her. The intimate conversations over mochas and fruit drinks; the quick inside exchanges around her desk when she had been Emblem’s administrative assistant; the letters they had passed to each other at lunch and over breaks, filled with witty Arabic and English language phrases; the emails, phone calls and text messages that they had sent back and forth on nights when her mother’s pain, and by default her own loneliness, had forced her to tears.

He had tried to pile it up and throw it away. Yet despite the sadness, anger and loneliness he had felt, Asher could not help but smile as he saw her. Somehow, despite everything, she was still beautiful.

Asher walked up and shook her hand. It was as velvety as ever.

“I missed you,” she said, after a long silence had allowed the ice to build up between them.

Asher nodded. Dina, who was usually so quick to speak up and out when awkward silences came, also fell quiet. Together, they gradually drifted to the windows. They watched the waters of the Nile tremble.

“Karen invited you here?” he finally asked, trying his hardest to make his voice sound indifferent.

She adjusted the strap on her green gypsy dress, the one that made her look so beautiful. Asher couldn’t help but steal a glance at her lower neck and chest.

“Yes,” she said, glancing up at him. “I had to see her before she left. She did so much for me.”

“I agree.”

Asher’s sudden infatuation was beginning to cool, though it seemed to bubble a little every time he glanced at Dina’s mocha colored skin and bright hazel eyes, her stout nose and pronounced lips.

“How is the company?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” he said, hoping his short answer would be enough to drive her away.

It seemed to be. In a few minutes she politely excused herself. As she slid back into the crowd around Karen, Asher couldn’t help but sense that she had wanted to tell him something or at least talk to him about their last conversation over the phone.

He loosened the collar of his shirt and wandered over to the piano. Ramez was playing a tune on it, drawing the attention of a few onlookers. Asher hoped the music would help him cool down from the strange cocktail or stirred anger and hormones that were refusing to settle.

He stood behind his back, watching him play for a few minutes, barely stopping himself from glancing around the room and searching for Dina’s amber haired head.

When he had concluded the piece, Ramez stood up and took a comical bow, turning to a small woman in a grey top and jeans who stood smoking a cigarette.

“That’s for you Maha,” he said, “to welcome you to Emblem.”

“Oh thank you, Ramez!” she cried, flashing him a wide and uninhibited smile with her smoky dark gray teeth.

Asher chuckled as she hugged the accountant with one arm. This wasn’t how he had intended to discover the identity of his new boss. Ramez made a few introductions for some other staff around the piano before he reached Asher.

“Maha, this is our copy writer, Asher.”

They shook hands after Maha discarded her cigarette into a nearby bin. She smiled so wide her brown eyes almost disappeared.

“It’s so great to meet you at last,” Asher said. “I hope to get to know you more before Karen leaves in May.”

“Oh you will, don’t worry! I’m a great person; I won’t get in the way of how you run things.”

Asher nodded.

“Great.” he said.

She moved on to Neveen, who stood chatting with her for a few minutes.

The necessary introduction over, Asher found himself eager to move again, away from the crowds and any chance of running into Dina while she was mingling. He tried to find a route through the ever shifting conversation crescents that took up the dining hall to the bar.

Inadvertently, he kept getting stopped by clients or peers searching for chit chat. Inevitably, he had to oblige them. It took him fifteen minutes of hopping from conversation to conversation before he was finally only a few steps away from the marble counter. He only had to dismiss himself from a group of photographers discussing their preferences for Canon or Nikon and he could be free to stand with his back to the crowd all night, hibiscus without sugar, the closest thing you could usually get to alcohol at most Egyptian restaurants.

He stood sipping his drinks for a while with his back to the crowd, trying to imagine as he had in his childhood that the bitter juice he was drinking was some hard scotch or whisky. At first he fumed over why Karen had neglected to tell him that she had invited Dina. Asher figured after a while that it was only because she had forgotten. Packing your whole life up and moving it across the world usually meant you had little time to remember other people’s lives.

When he finally reached his tenth drink, Asher began to notice the chatter behind him had dimmed. He turned and found only a half dozen people left in the dining room, most of them congregated around Karen, whose blond hair bobbed above a lake of brunette and black heads. Asher watched as woman after woman posed for photos with her, hugging and pecking her on the cheek. It seemed as if Karen had been doing it all night.

Then, from behind a pair of Omran executives, a tall man in a light suit appeared. He drew attention to himself mainly because of his height. He adjusted his thin glasses and approached Karen. They shook hands and after he spoke a few words to her, Karen’s face lit up with recognition. It was then that Dina suddenly emerged from the crowd once again and made her way towards them. Asher took one look at the man’s beaming face, his proud and comforted eyes filled with longing, and turned his back again, though he still saw Dina’s hand reach out and grab his hand.

He left the boat a few minutes later without saying goodbye to Karen, Dina or her fiancée. 

This will probably end up being one of the surreal magical realism stories. It’s based on a nightmare I had last night but it’s significantly embellished. I wonder if I’ll have even more of these strange dreams in the future. 

 

The Obligation of Love

One night, I was walking a city that I did not know. The streets were paved with cobblestone and bricks the color of sand. I could see the womanly human curves of towers all around me. A few small fires, held aloft in the iron hands of black sconces along the walls provided light. I walked along for some time across the stones.

For all the past elegance of the towers and walls the street itself seemed severely lacking in beauty and grandeur. Papers and pictures, strewn across the ground, scurried as I walked. Faded photographs of Nasser and Sadat lay alongside crumpled old newspapers emblazoned with headlines and photos reporting the last war with Israel. Then, as I rounded a sharp turn on this street I found a strange sight. Employment letters and CVs, all stamped in red with the word rejected, sat collecting dust in a narrow alley just across the way from a fountain and its basin filled with the noseless busts of pharaohs, Greeks and Romans and the banners of countless conquerors. Above it all, above all the idols and statues, crucifixes, bits of Red communist dogma, and a small American flag sat a worn emerald book perched on the highest point of the fountain.

I marveled at this fountain for some time until a faint noise drew me down another broad avenue. The sound was somewhere between a rumble of thunder and a groan of anguish. I came to a large souk. Once again no one was here save for the presences of the vigilant towers. Yet the souk hardly needed guarding. Its shops and all their shelves were empty, carrying nothing but a few piles of dust.

I heard the rumble and groan once again and moved towards it. I found a tall wall blocking a street on one side of the souk. Its black and white stones formed a chessboard that stretched high above toward a dark sky. As I approached its base, I reached out and placed my index finger upon one of the stones. It was both cold and hot at the same time.

I turned my head up and found another face staring down at me; bony, masculine portrait riddled with the lines of age. I took a step back and beheld his frail and fragile body draped in an oversize white army jacket laden with a montage of rusting medallions.

I asked the old man what he was doing up there.

“I used to live in the city where you stand.” He said. “But overtime everything started to get old and tattered so I moved to this wall this wall we built to protect what we had.”

I wondered from who but the answer came with the tremendous sound again, the rumble that shook the stones and sent dust escaping into the air. The old man laughed it off.

“Oh the children,” He chuckled, wagging hi finger down at the invisible force on the other side of the barrier. “Don’t behave like this anymore I’m warning you. This is for your own good.”

He turned back and looked down at me, his eyes raging with monstrous suicidal glee. I took it as a sign and withdrew to the souk. The old man continued to linger on his wall, patrolling back and forth across its top as his stones continue to shake and tremble. Soon the unseen hands were hurling debris at him from pieces of bread, to rotten fruit to wads of paper made of electricity bills and pictures of dead and tortured young men. All the time, the old man continued to laugh at his children. Then, suddenly, a thin young man dressed in blue jeans and a grey sweatshirt climbed hoisted himself from the other side of the wall.

The old man, suddenly incensed and frightened charged raising his fists. He wrestled with the young man for a while until finally overpowered he was hoisted up into the air by his attacker and hurled down into the souk below. His body struck one of the empty stalls which vaporized into a cloud of particles.

The young man, victorious raised his arms into the air and cried at which time the stones suddenly, shaken out of place by the siege, aligned like soldiers snapping to attention. Then with one wave of the young man’s right hand the stones slid back in unison and opened the street.

Unsure of what great force I would see sweeping down into the souk, into this deserted city I timidly peaked from behind the canvas of one of the stalls.

I expected a hoard of people; this I saw.

I expected a mob of many different people; this I saw.

What I did not expect was to see only children and youths, skinny to the bone wrapped in green, red, blue and white outfits hobbling inside. Their eyes were glazed over, partly shrouded by their grey lids. They were as thin and as starved as the old man they had thrown from the wall. I could not spy the youth who had done the deed among the crowd. His face had not been glimpsed by me and it was still a mystery.

I stood by as the hoard made its way through the souk, searching each of the empty stall and heaving as they came. I asked one boy, in a green cap and robe what he needed. He didn’t reply, instead he made his way with the others up the avenue towards the fountain. I followed the crowd up the broad street. They moved as weakly as slothlike as ever until the front caught sight of the fountain. Then suddenly their paced quickened and a mob of blue, red and green clad boys and girls crowded around the fountain hurling the statues and figures aside until only the fountain was empty. It was then I noticed a small inscription carved into the base of the dry basin. It was one phrase: We want, want…

“We want…” one of the little girls hissed between her teeth.

Another boy picked up her words like a flu.

“We want.” He gasped. “We want…”

The words began to resonate, opening eyes, straightening backs. There was recognition. Soon these words were flowing from all their mouths. Even I couldn’t help but join in. Yet I couldn’t not figure out what they so desperately wanted. I began to wonder if perhaps they themselves didn’t know. Then suddenly, when the call was becoming deafening, another word appeared from a girl with long dark hair in a blue dress at the front.

“Water…” She hissed.

The chanting stopped at once. It started after a short respite but new words began to be added: Freedom, liberty, justice, order, honesty, bread, books, safety, love.
The chanting reached another climax which was broken by a voice from above.

“It will all come.” It said.

Eyes turned to the roof of one of the old buildings that bordered the street. The man in the sweatshirt who had overthrown the old man was standing between two towers, his arms folded.
He repeated his words again and fell back. Suddenly, the weary eyed children began whispering and chatting among themselves.

“It will all come? How? How will it come? It was all supposed to be here?”

“Don’t you see? We have to find it ourselves.” Said one of the boys in blue. “We have to give ourselves the tools to survive on our own.”

“I agree.” Said the green boy I had tried to question earlier. “But we can’t do it alone. We need something to stand on, something to be a foundation as we put life back into this city.”

“Where has he gone?” Wept one of the girls, speaking of the young man in the sweatshirt. “Why did he leave us?”

I wondered the exact same thing but not for long. Suddenly tall shapes appeared from the tops of the towers. The children clustered together staring at the peaks. In the shadow I could make out shining pieces of silver armor.

“Don’t be afraid,” The voice said. “We are the watchmen. We have heard your pleas and will give you what you ask. We only ask patience and a respect for our wishes. Please know the souk is off limits to you. You may only gather around the fountain. If you try and enter our towers or our walls we shall not hesitate to protect ourselves. We wish the best for you. Please work with us. You and we are one.”

The men in armor disappeared and children began to debate. Some of those in blue and those in green proclaimed that the men in the towers had no right to lord over them and set off for the souk. Most, stayed around the fountain talking among themselves about the city and where they would go from here.

The new development did not keep me in around the fountain. Instead, I saw out of the corner of my eye a door, marked with a large D. I hadn’t noticed this door or the golden letter that sparkled so brightly. With the children justifiably engrossed in their own affairs, I put my hand on the wooden façade and pushed the door open. A long corridor waited. Unlit, I could still see its tight walls and low ceiling. A bent down on my knees and made my way, emerging after sometime into the back of the Ibn Tulun Mosque.
I wasn’t sure if the mosque had moved to this distant city or if I had suddenly returned from my own wonderland back to the reality of Cairo. It was night here as well but the moon was full and beaming. I walked into the central courtyard around the fountain. I was making my way to the center of the square when I was joined by the woman whose heart I had so badly desired to own.

She looked at me and into me. My pain became her burden and her beautiful face winced under the weight.

“It was what was best for me.” She said.

“Of course.” He said. “Love is just an obligation, to yourself, to your family. You couldn’t marry a man like me because I’m not a real man.”

Tears welled up her eyes; somehow, even at that moment, I couldn’t help but notice their beauty.

“I’m an America, I’m not Egyptian or Coptic or a man with wasta and connections. My heart breaks so easily and real men can’t be broken in any way or so you think, so I believe you think.”

Only then, when I coughed from a dry throat, did I realize that I had been screaming. I changed my tone as she wept but kept my venomous condescension.

“You are right; I can’t love you as much as he can. And you aren’t obligated to love me, especially if I’m not Egyptian. What connection could their possibly be between us? This is what you believe, right?
She didn’t say a word instead she turned her back went inside the fountain. I turned around to leave but when I had taken only a few steps I heard the crunch of dirt beneath souls coming from behind me and I looked back.

Another person had emerged from the fountain. It was the young man in the grey sweatshirt. As soon as he smiled I recognized it was Kareem.

“Hi.” He said.

Now suddenly it was my turn to cry. I sobbed, and I sobbed lowering myself to my knees. The tears never seemed enough and I began to beat myself. Abruptly, Kareem’s hands caught my own.

“Enough,” He told me.

He raised me to my feet.

“I didn’t mean you.” I confessed. “I didn’t mean you…I failed I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left. It was the wrong decision.”

“I don’t blame you.” He said. “Life gives us our struggles and our fights. Sometimes, we can’t always win on our own.”
I nodded and gazed up at the moon, wishing its light would go out. It didn’t.

“I have to read it.”

Kareem nodded.

“What if I can’t pull through…again?”

Kareem’s smile widened.

“It won’t be too bad.” He promised. “Our struggle always becomes someone else’s at some point.” 
Then, he too, stepped back into the fountain and was gone. 

 Khaled Said: The First Martyr of Egypt's Revolution. 

١٢ Twelve١٢

Karen’s last day at Emblem was void of events. There was no final, final party to send her off with a gift from the office staff. That had all been taken care of at the office party a month before. Nevertheless, there seemed to be an endless cycle of people coming in and out of her office. Uncharacteristically, they waited near the door and reception instead of walking in, biding their time until the other person had had a chance to say their private goodbyes.

Asher eventually took his turn as well, waiting until 4:45. He cut it close, but that was the only time he could go out and grab two cold Stella beers from around the corner at Drinkies. None of the ‘office boys’ would have touched the bottles.

“You cut it close,” Karen said, her face smoothing over at the sight of the stout, perspiring bottle.

They drank with the door closed for a few minutes. Asher thought his drink seemed a tad too bitter. Perhaps a touch of bitterness was appropriate. He wasn’t upset at Karen. He didn’t blame her for moving stateside. She’d had these plans in the works for a while, long before January. He only wished she could stay on. He was going to miss having her around.

She had stayed a little longer than expected, until June, to help show Maha the ropes. Their future replacement had moved into the office beside Karen’s, slowly getting the hang of Emblem’s filing system. Asher had spoken to her only a few times since she had arrived. She was a nice person, considerate, good in meetings, although she could be a bit vapid at times. She wasn’t Karen, but she didn’t have to be. The former was far from perfect anyway. Karen had her Stella and Maha had her cigarettes, which she smoked incessantly on the balcony of their office.

Their beers drained, Asher checked the time and put his hands inside his pockets.

“I’m sorry to cut it short but I have to get going.”

Karen smiled and nodded. It was a smile of gratitude.

“You take care of yourself, kiddo,” she said.

“Sure thing.”

And with that, Asher left Karen’s office on her last day, bypassing Nadya and Neveen, who were waiting outside for their turns. Maha’s office was black, as she usually left at 4:00. Asher clocked out and made his way downstairs. He first walked to Mohandiseen, where he paid the internet bill for his flat. He then grabbed a cab to his flat in Dokki. Traffic was awful. It had been steadily getting worse over the last two months. Asher almost felt taunted by the flashing taillights of the SUV in front of them. It was like watching a chrome face that would wink or scowl at you depending on the mood.

Asher reached home at around 7:45. He climbed the stairs and entered his apartment just like every other night. He logged into his computer, another end of the day habit, and checked the progress of the latest clashes downtown.

There had been a series of running battles in Tahrir again. Several families of ‘martyrs’ −demonstrators killed in the streets during the Uprising− had gotten into a squabble with police monitoring an event they were attending in Agouza. Blows had been struck. Who had thrown the first one depended on who you asked. In any case, the small brawl had escalated into first a march to Tahrir by the incensed families and then into running battles between groups of angry shebab and riot police who had tried to stop the procession. The very presence of the men in black, without their friends in fatigues, had swelled the size and rage of the crowd, that had battered them all the way to the Square.

Now, via Al Masry Al Youm, Asher found out that the police were withdrawing altogether, leaving the square to the youth. He wondered how long it would be before batageya, thugs who sometimes appeared to block the demonstrators, appeared.

Sufficiently satisfied with his knowledge of the world, Asher closed his web browser and went to the fridge. He poured himself a very large glass of gin, which would last him the night, and brought it to the table. Peter was away on a brief romp with Monica in Farafra. He had the flat all to himself for the next three days.

He took a sip of the gin and walked back to his room. He rubbed the dust off Kareem’s USB drive and brought it back to his laptop. He placed it in the port and while the software installed he sent one SMS out:

Sender: Asher
+2010738232
June. 30 2011
Message:

Hey,
I tried reaching you a few times. I just wanted you to know I’m finally looking at the flash drive. Give my best to your mother and your family. God bless you.

He had just opened the first of several dozen numbered PDFs on the drive when his phone trembled.

He had a response.

Sender: Ayman
+201648392
June. 30 2011
Message:

When you’re done let me know. I know you’ll have questions.

Asher was sure he would.

gamalmustafathelegen21: More fighting in Tahrir! New protests next week I have to wonder if our martyrs will ever receive justice! Generals, Tantawi, please hear our call.

Aya48: Oh Lord, please spare us this terrible fiasco. This fighting must stop. No more burned churches in Imbabah, no more police and shebab beating each other in Tahrir.

IslamMO: I’ll be out in the streets again soon. Tahrir is ours, not the army, not the police!!! Mubarak was not our father. They are not our fathers!!!

Killerishaq43: I want to make sure our country lives until the next year. Egypt needs its new leaders now. Where, oh where can we turn?

Shaheed203: As the messenger of God has spoken “The worst of guardians is a cruel ruler. Beware of becoming one of them.”

Christianhero354: The army is with the Muslim Brotherhood is slaughtering Egypt’s Christians. They are with the Salafis. When oh Lord will they stop killing us?

Many centuries ago, Egypt was a land of many deities.

It was a land of many priests and temples.

It was a land where God went by many names.

Then, one Pharaoh tried to give God one name.

This Pharaoh was Akhenaton

God’s other names disappeared or were made subservient.

Only Aten was supreme.

Aten the shimmering sun.

All other temples were neglected for the sake of one.

Soon, a city of temples was commissioned.

A city of temples for Aten,

A gift from his devoted servant.


Akhenaton chose the location himself.

He chose a place in the desert.

As he surveyed the location surrounded by his attendants a lone figure appeared from the banks of the Nile.


It was an old man and the Pharaoh allowed him to approach his entourage.


The old man asked for an audience with the ruler of the twin crowns.


Akhenaton met with him.

“You may speak.” He told the old man as he stood before him.


“Pharaoh,” the old man began. “I have a message from Egypt.”


Akhenaton was puzzled.


“I am Egypt.” He said. “The Pharaoh is Egypt; my law is Egypt’s law, my vision is Egypt’s vision.”

“The Pharaoh channels the spirit of Egypt.” The old man elaborated. “He is chose by the Gods, by the Nile to embody the spirit that dwells in all of us not to alter it as he sees fit.”


“What do you mean?”


“I mean, that Egypt is more than Akhenaton or Aten. The Sun shines from above on all of us but what would Egypt be without Nut ruling the skies? What would Egypt be without the Nile flood that Hapy brings every year? What would Egypt be without Ptah the creator and Hathor who brings love and merriment into the hearts of men and women? What would Egypt be without the fertility of women and the protection of Bes? What would Egypt be without Isis and Osiris and their son Horus whose spirit brings Pharaoh his own divinity?

“I tell you, all these forces make up the spirit of this land. Without them, Egypt, would be but just another part of the great ocean of dunes that encompass the East and the West. The sun would shine everlasting on an empty land barren and void of all life and wonder. I tell you this in the hopes that you will honor other powers besides your own and remain true to the spirit in its whole.”


Akhenaton replied.

“Old one, I do not question your intentions. I am sure they are noble. Please know though that you are gravely mistaken. I love Aten above all others, this is true, but I have not forsaken the gods, I am merely building a new faith for all people, a faith that honors a common God. Power shall be taken away from the priests of Amun, who abuse their position so that one man may lead and one God instruct and oversee. Only when it is behind me, will Egypt be strong.”

The old man answered.

“Your need to please your god runs against the wishes of the people of Egypt. For just as the Sun, Aten, needs other powers and deities to keep the land fertile and his temples stocked with offerings of food and incense, so too does Pharaoh rely on the efforts of his people to build his palace and keep his coffers full. The people are not behind you but beneath you, supporting you and should you fail to honor them then they themselves shall crawl out from under you.”

Akhenaton spoke.

“Is this all you wish to say?”

“Almost, I shall leave with this: Egypt is Egypt. It can never be anything more or less. Egyptians will be Egyptians and cannot be changed to suit the vision of one man. If you change the foundation of our country, we shall obey you for a time, but if you neglect this land, it’s sky, it’s river, its wetlands, its farms, its mountains, its borders, its animals, its people then Egypt will abandon you and if necessary destroy all you have created.”


Having delivered his message, the old man returned to the banks of the Nile from where he had appeared leaving Akhenaton to build his city in the desert.

A Life Begins in Aswan

This story has its origins with a name, a place, and a time like most do. The name is Anwar, the place is Aswan, the time is 1974, a year after the October War with Israel. As with many children, his name also belonged to his father’s father, who happened to be present at his birth. His mother’s father was not present. In fact, none of his mother’s family had come to see their new kin. Anwar’s mother, Mariam, had been born into a Coptic family in the city of Aswan. She had grown up on the side of the Nile opposite his father, Musa, whose village can still be found on the slower, less industrialized west bank of the river near the foot of the Tomb of the Nobles.

Anwar’s father was, according to his people, a skilled boatman and fisherman with a reputation for seducing European girls who traveled to Egypt’s southern city searching for a glimpse of life on the Nile. Musa’s womanizing skills were complemented by his chiseled Nubian features, which are still remembered with yearning smiles by older women in his community today. It’s believed his charm and his skin are what enchanted Mariam, who according to relatives had a strained relationship with her controlling father. Her infatuation was so deep that she abandoned her family and married a Nubian Muslim at the age of seventeen.

No one is quite sure how they first met or how their courtship went unnoticed. Engagements often pop out of the walls in this country. Needless to say, when news of their engagement hit the city it caused a scandal. In these days, I imagine such an arrangement would lead to riots and a church burning. Such a tragedy probably would have unfolded then too if it hadn’t been for the intervention of the local Coptic bishop. After holding a conference with Nubian sheikhs, Mariam’s family, and members of the local Coptic community, an agreement was reached in which Mariam would convert to Islam and marry Musa, provided she never spoke to her parents, siblings or any other member of the Coptic Community again. The marriage was celebrated with vigor on the Western side of the Nile a few weeks later, while the East remained unusually calm.

Anwar entered the world about eleven months later, born into a mixed home with a tainted reputation. According to neighbors, he often found himself caught between his bickering parents, who frequently clashed over Mariam’s tepid enthusiasm regarding her new religion. She rarely attended prayers and refused to wear the veil,a fact which made Musa’s already controversial marriage a target for gossip in his small Nubian community. The jubilation at having received a new convert into their midst had faded as soon as the wedding dances had ended.

Angry at his smeared ego, and desperate to force his wife to adopt a more ‘modest’ appearance, Musa began to beat Mariam frequently. His fists were fueled occasionally by methamphetamines.

Yet for all her misery Mariam refused to submit, and over time Musa frequented their small home less and less, often opting to stay on the eastern bank where he continued to cavort with Western women.

Mariam, a light skinned Egyptian girl, was left largely on her own among her husband’s people who, by their own accounts, did very little to help her because they blamed her for the trouble in her home. Anwar was also subject to the community’s coldness, albeit on a lesser level. People were always a little friendlier to him when his mother was not around. He had friends, but only a few, and none of them ever came over to his home as rumor had spread that his mother was some sort of witch or prostitute who had driven his father away with her spells and debauchery.

Sharing the distinction of being outcasts, Anwar and his mother forged a strong bond. They were frequently seen at market together. 

 

At the age of six, Anwar’s life took an unexpected and tragic turn. After being gone for almost four months straight, Musa returned to his wife and child. He explained that he had been on a trip to Sudan and that he had made a deal which would make them all rich. He carried with him a large canvas bag which he wanted to keep at home. Eager to give her vagrant husband a thorough tongue lashing, Mariam sent Anwar out of the house.

When I was in Aswan, a childhood friend of Anwar’s, Hamzah, remembered how on that day, he and Anwar had climbed to the top of the Tomb of the Nobles just after his father arrived. From the base of the Sufi shrine that adorns the summit of the mountain, they spent several hours lazily watching the feluccas gliding between islands in the Nile and hurling stones down the deep sides of the cliff. This, according to Hamzah, kept them occupied until around sunset. It was then that they suddenly heard the rattle of assault rifles coming from the village below.

By the time they reached the base of the hill the entire community was out trying to learn what had happened. A pair of police officers, dressed in uniform and cradling Kalashnikovs, emerged from the bush with Anwar’s bloodied and semi-conscious father in tow. Moments later, plainclothes officers came out. One carried Musa’s sack while another three held Mariam’s limp body. Anwar screamed and ran to his mother as the officers dropped her on the dirt. Their uniformed companions tagging along as a mob, demanding answers, began to swarm them. Anwar lay atop his mother’s bloodied body, bawling his eyes out as his father was dragged to a police boat.

Arrested for drug smuggling, Musa was handed a seventy year prison term and his drugs were confiscated. However, the police refused to take any responsibility for Mariam’s death, who, they claimed, was shot by her husband as he tried to fire on the officers. Anwar could never remember a gun in the house or that his father had ever purchased one. He would recall, according to others, how the entire inside of his small home was riddled with pockmarks on the walls and AK-47 casings on the floor.

His mother was buried in an Islamic fashion a few days later. None of her family came, and only a few of Anwar’s relatives paid their respects. Hamzah, who was also at the funeral, remembers how six year old Anwar bade his mother farewell with a Nasheed he had memorized. Hamzah couldn’t recall all the lyrics, but he remembered these few lines.

Oh Lord, the hypocrites took her away and the hypocrites failed to protect her.

Protect her heart; protect her in the hereafter.

I cannot bear the burdens of this world.

But give me the strength to struggle another day,

Until my sin and failure is cast aside and I can dwell with her in paradise.

According to Hamzah, Anwar later had to finish burying his mother by himself as the two uncles helping him left for afternoon prayers and never came back. He then sat by her grave for the entire night, crying until the sun rose the next morning. A few weeks later after being bounced from relative to relative, Anwar’s grandfather, his namesake, put him on a train north to Cairo to live with another of his uncles in Moqattam. 

Anwar’s story will continue in the next post. At the end of this first and tragic part of his life, I will only say that with his mixed heritage and sad upbringing, Anwar is an embodiment of everything Egyptian. He represents the Egypt I know and the one I grew up in. His story began, not with his birth, but with his mother’s death. Injustice visited his home at a young age: when his father abandoned his family; when his community refused to aid him; when his mother’s dreams of a happy loving life were crushed; and when he lost the only person in the world he had ever loved. Injustice set him on a course; it put him on a train to Cairo and it would eventually drive him to do much, much more.

Taking Root in Moqattam

An orphan at the age of six, Anwar Musa came to live with his father’s youngest brother, Omar, in 1980, about two years after the signing of the Camp David Accords and a year before the assassination of the president who signed them. A zabaal, one of Cairo’s famed garbage-men, Omar, was like his nephew; an outcast among the family. Around the age of fifty his father had taken a second, younger Egyptian wife who had died giving birth to their first and only son. Omar also married to a non-Nubian, a Moqattam resident named Jannah. She lived with him and their two sons in an unpainted, skinless brick apartment building on the periphery of Garbage City.

I imagine for Anwar, used to the brightly decorated and colorful house of Nubia, the unadorned bricks and concrete were difficult to adjust to along with the piles of garbage that filled every nook and cranny of every street and sometimes even rooms in zabaleen neighborhoods.

I went to Anwar’s old home four years ago and spoke to his uncle and aunt who were still alive. From the thin plastic chairs in their cramped kitchen/dining room, they told me how shy and withdrawn Anwar had been when he first arrived. He had barely eaten and had spent hours each day sitting at the edge of their bed singing to himself. But, little by little, the boy from Aswan began to explore his new neighborhood.

In part, say his uncle and aunt, this had to do with his cousin, their eldest son, Abu Bakr, who took it upon himself to look after his younger cousin like a brother. I found Abu Bakr a few years after meeting Omar and his wife. He says that he began taking his little cousin out during the day when he wasn’t working or studying. Together they began exploring large parts of Moqattam.

For those of you unfamiliar with the area, Moqattam is a dusty and arid neighborhood of half finished brick apartment buildings lying at the base of a mountain from which the area takes its name. In the past the area was separated from Cairo proper, but like the once distant locations of Giza and Imbabah, Moqattam has now been swallowed up by the city’s urban expansion. Cairo’s garbage collectors, many of them Coptic Christians, have lived in this area for several generations. For years they have made their living using whatever pieces of refuse they can. The narrow streets of this area are stacked with tower after tower of discarded paper, plastic bottles, and aluminum cans all of which are eventually recycled by the residents of the community. These piles of refuse take up so much room that even narrow alleyways and empty rooms in the zabaleen’s homes and apartment buildings become storage rooms for the waste. Because of this Moqattam serves the distinction of being both the home of Cairo’s garbage men as well as the final destination for most of its waste. The smell of the garbage permeates everything and everyone who lives there.

This was the world Anwar had entered, and it was a world he would soon know in every detail. By the time he was eight, Anwar’s knowledge of the area surpassed Abu Bakr’s, who frequently relied on him to navigate the streets. It was around this age that Anwar began learning his uncle’s trade. At first he worked at sorting the materials into various categories and piles. He was particularly fond of paper and began pocketing pieces of discarded homework, newspapers, magazines and sometimes even textbooks that occasionally made it into the piles. Soon he was taking these papers home, reading them for hours at a time. This interest in reading translated into an early interest in school, this despite the widely believed incompetence of the local teachers and his classmates’ scorn for his darker skin.

Anwar soon developed a reputation for being a bright student with an aptitude for Arabic and mathematics. He was also fairly athletic, playing football with other boys in the street as many Egyptian children do today. Yet Anwar’s favorite subject and pastime was always reading stories, particularly hero tales.

“The first thing he ever read outside of school was a comic book,” Abu Bakr related to me when we met in an ahwa in El Hussein years later. “He found it while sorting through one of the heaps of paper my father had brought in from some street in Mohandiseen. It was in great condition and had a number of stories about American superheroes like Spiderman, the X-men and the Green Giant…I think he’s called something else in the West.”

Anwar would pour over this book day in and day out. Eventually, though, he decided he needed a new adventure tale and convinced his uncle to take him on his rounds one day.

“I hoped he’d find a new discarded book.” Abu Bakr remembers. “Alhamdulillah, he found one in a bin just outside the flat of a physician. He was extremely happy when he got home that day. He read the whole book in a single night, but the next morning was strange as he seemed sad. He was moping. I asked him what was wrong, and he showed me the second to last story in the book. In the first part, the hero Batman’s parents are murdered by a man as they come out of a theater. Later in the story Batman finds the man who committed the murder, a man who later turns out to be protected by corrupt policemen. In the end Batman puts him and the officials in prison and puts flowers on his parent’s grave.”

“I asked him why the story made him upset. I was pretty sure I already knew the answer, but when he finally spoke up he surprised me. He said, ‘In all these books, these heroes save people; they defeat bad people with huge armies and incredible weapons; they put corrupt people in prison and make sure villains can’t get away. But that’s only in places like America? If these men are so powerful and so determined to fight against evil and save people why can’t they save people here? Why can’t they stop bad people here and put them in prison?’”

“I tried to remind him that it was all just a piece of fiction, that the stories weren’t real. I think he knew that, but he saw so much of what had happened to his mother and father in that story he couldn’t get it out of his mind.”

The incident didn’t stop Anwar from trying to obtain as many of these books as he could. His obsession with them became so discomfiting to his uncle that he eventually had to hide them.

“He read them for a while,” his aunt recalled. “Omar and I were worried he had an unhealthy obsession. When he was twelve we decided to try and send him to our local mosque to study religion and learn the values of Islam. We didn’t want the West to make him lose his identity.”

Their local mosque was just a short walk down the hill from their flat. Anwar and his cousin were taken under the wing of the local sheikh, a middle aged Imam named Jibril Suleiman. Jibril’s teachings and messages, which can still be bought and are sold on audiotapes and CDs outside Al Ahzar mosque today, struck a chord with the boys along with many other youth from the neighborhood.

“He was a great speaker,” a local resident who asked not to be named told me. “And on top of that he spoke in a way we understood. He spoke about our struggles to make ends meet, to put food and electricity in our homes and get ahead in life. He also understood the anger inside us, the anger at how after so many years of Nasser and Sadat and now Mubarak, we had seen our country become poorer and poorer while the elites became wealthier. He understood the shame we lived with, the lack of dignity.”

Here is a transcript of part of a speech given by Sheikh Jibril, one which I’m told had a resounding impact on all the youth of the area. It dates from around 1986.

“God’s justice is for the unjust; not those who struggle in his name and in the name of the glorious message given to us by the messenger, may peace be upon him. His punishment is reserved for the sinners, the apostates, the hypocrites and those who refuse to listen and believe. The history of the prophets and his messenger provide us with countless examples of God’s wrath for the unjust. Yet he rewards those who seek his forgiveness and compassion and brings them to the straight path as he sees fit.”

“You are sons of the Garbage City; you are the seeds of flowers grown in Saida or sprouting from the unpaved streets of the poorest neighborhoods and hardened by the contempt shown by those above you. All your lives no one has given you a hand except to smack you down and steal what you have. No one has helped you or given you any assistance. Your families starve as they waste their bodies for a few loaves of bread each day; your children go to schools and earn degrees for jobs that are not open to them, reserved for the Doctors and Professors of Maadi and Heliopolis. The future is as it has always been for you, closed and shut behind walls of privilege, connections and the men with clubs who watch them.”

“Our homeland is infected with a cancer, a cancer that ruins our souls and bodies, a cancer that forces us to beg and scheme and plot and shriek for every scrap of cheese, every piaster, every compliment we can get our hands on. Our dignity is gone, but I tell you, if you turn from this cancer, if you remove it from yourselves and turn to the righteous path, the injustices shall end.”

While there’s no proof that Anwar’s infatuation with Sheikh Jibril began after this speech, there’s no doubt that he and the fiery preacher became close compatriots after that first year.

“He began to read the Qur’an and the tafsir constantly,” Abu Bakr says. “And he was almost always at the mosque speaking to the Sheikh about justice and God’s will. It pleased my parents a lot how close he and the sheikh had become. They would take long walks together through the street, discussing and debating about the rule of law and the source of corruption in our society.”

“He came to break the fast and have Iftar with our family quite a few times during Ramadan and he let Anwar lead the Maghrib prayer. It was quite an honor. Afterwards he said to us, ‘Anwar is truly a believer. I know he will serve the umma well.’”

Between 1986 and 1988, Anwar continued his studies both at school and with the sheikh and worked in the recycling business with the other youth of the area, all while continuing to read and reread his comics, albeit less frequently.

“He talked a lot about going to Al Azhar to study religious law,” his uncle Omar remarked. “He also talked about wanting to be a lawyer and fight for justice for clients in Moqattam. Sheikh Jibril opened his eyes to something new and grand. It was incredible to behold. I was skeptical he could do it, but I hoped he could.” 

In 1988, Anwar would get his first taste of what it meant to enforce justice and how difficult a struggle it truly was.

Martha Zakariya, a Christian housewife of a zabaal, gave her eye witness account of what happened from her unadorned balcony just beneath St. Simeon’s monastery.

“I testified to the police later on,” she told me. “I told them everything I’m going to tell you, but it made no difference. The authorities never take Christian testimony seriously in this country. Anyway, I was preparing a meal for my husband and children like every night, when I stepped outside for a bit to collect the laundry. I had just taken down the bed sheets when I saw something moving in the alley beneath me. I looked down and saw my neighbor, Fatimah, being assaulted by a mustachioed man in a leather jacket. I called out to them, but the man ignored me and continued groping the poor girl.”

“I kept yelling and screaming for someone to help her. I was crying and about to head down there myself when a young man appeared out of the dark and tackled the man. They wrestled for several minutes. The boy was very inexperienced and was beaten very badly by the man. The girl tried to help a little as well, but she wasn’t strong enough and got pushed aside. Finally, the boy grabbed a brick and smashed it on the man’s head. He cursed the young one several times before he pulled out a gun and shot him twice. The gunshots brought more people out of their balconies and the man fled, leaving the boy to die on the street.”

“God blessed him that night, I believe, because he lived. But had I known what would come of it I don’t think I would have prayed as hard for his recovery.”

Anwar’s aunt and uncle were astounded when they heard that their nephew had been shot during a fight.

“We didn’t know the details at first,” Omar confided in me. “We only knew he was recovering in the house of a neighbor of ours, Hussein Baky. When we went over, we found his daughter Fatimah tending to him. Poor deaf girl; she had just been assaulted and was tending to her rescuer’s wounds. Still, I think if she had dressed a little more modestly that whole event wouldn’t have happened.”

Abu Bakr, who had left Anwar earlier that day after finishing their evening prayers at the mosque, was guilt ridden.

“I was responsible,” he confessed with tears welling up in his eyes. “I should have stayed with him. He had been taking a lot of long walks around the neighborhoods in the evenings. In my opinion, I think he was already beginning his career then. He was only sixteen, but he was beginning to make rounds and look for crimes to stop. I suppose I thought something like that then, but I never raised the issue with my mother or father.”

The Baky family paid for Anwar’s medical bills as a token of gratitude. Anwar spent the better part of two months on crutches while his family filed a report at one of the police stations with testimony from Martha Zakariya. Neither Anwar nor Fatimah knew who the attacker was and could only give brief descriptions to the police.

“He was silent during that time.” According to Abu Bakr, “He never spoke about the shooting, not even to me. His attitude and demeanor were almost the same as they had been when he first came to us.”

One day, on a Friday about three months after the shooting, Anwar was standing on the roof of the building after only recently regaining the use of his legs.

“I had gone up to the roof to check on him,” recounts Jannah. “When I reached the top I found him staring down at the street. I followed his gaze. He was looking over at the mosque to a group of men sitting idly at an ahwa, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea.”

“‘Do you know those people?’ I asked him.”

“He shook his head, but told me they’d been sitting at the ahwa since that morning and had arrived on a police lorry. I told him not to worry about it and ordered him to get downstairs and help move some tables around so I could clean. Deep down, though, those men worried me too. Rumors had been circulating in our neighborhood that the man Anwar had attacked was a plainclothes police officer or the son of a State Security man. If that was true we knew they’d probably be coming for him.”

Unnerved by the plainclothes men so close to their home, Anwar’s aunt called one of her neighbors and asked her to keep an eye on them for her.

“My husband and son were in the city working. Only Anwar and I were at home. I wanted so badly to ask some of my male neighbors to come over, but I was so afraid the officers would notice and barge in. So I asked my friend across the street to call us if they saw anything, and I chopped up the mulukwhia and stirred the rice I’d been preparing for our meal. Anwar was quiet, dead quiet, as I cooked. He sat facing the door with his hands between his legs. He was waiting for them to break in and take him.”

Jannah had finished preparing their lunch when their phone rang.

“I grabbed the receiver so quickly,” she recounts. “Anwar was on his feet, glaring at the door. ‘They’re moving,’ my neighbor whispered. ‘They’re heading towards the mosque. No wait, wait they’ve stopped…they’re surrounding a car coming up the other way. Sorry, I have to go.’”

“I put down the phone and told Anwar what I had heard. He opened the door and headed downstairs as quickly as he could. I followed behind. I never heard the engines of the two police lorries that pulled up beside the mosque and unloaded about a dozen officers with guns, but I saw them as soon as I entered the street. Young men were out all over the place shouting and cursing. The plainclothes men Anwar had spotted had made a circle around a small red fiat parked at the mosque entrance. I recognized the car immediately; it was Sheikh Jibril’s.”

“Before I could say anything, Anwar was limping towards the mob of angry shebab and infuriated officers who had formed a ring around their plainclothes comrades. I followed behind him, trying to call out to him, but if he heard me he didn’t care. He reached the front line of the officers just as the Sheikh and his two sons were pulled from the car. Some of the youths threw stones at the lorries as the officers loaded him into one. I think the Sheikh had been having health problems. He was very frail looking and yet somehow he still seemed strong. He smiled and waved to the shebab as he was shoved inside, almost as if he were on his way to paradise. The officers moved back inside their trucks and drove away, chased by our young men.”

“As the crowd branched off into groups of people arguing about what to do, I saw Anwar again. He was standing near the entrance to the mosque, just standing there looking inside. I approached him and saw his lips were moving; he was singing a Nasheed I had never heard before.”

“‘They’ve gone too far,’ he told me. ‘They are not our countrymen, no more than the Israelis. They won’t ever take anyone away ever again, I swear to God. I swear to God, I will not allow that to happen again. This world belongs to us, not them. Those who do not fear death never die. Those who are not afraid to struggle will be victorious.’”

“If I remember correctly, that was a favorite phrase of Sheikh Jibril.”

According to his family, Anwar continued speaking like this for many weeks afterward. He tried to get in several times to see the Sheikh’s trial, but he never could. He also tried several times to offer his services to his lawyers, while also raising awareness about the Sheikh’s detention with Islamist and Human Rights groups. Unfortunately, it didn’t produce results.

About a month after he was arrested, Jibril Suleiman and his sons were convicted of crimes against the state − specifically, of allegedly inciting violence against the president and the interior minister − and they sentenced him to thirteen years. They also received an additional fifteen years for drug smuggling based on the testimony of a Moqattam resident, the area’s leading drug dealer, Sufyan el Amr.

Abu Bakr was the first to read about the news in an area newspaper.

“I wasn’t sure Anwar had heard the news yet, so I took the paper home to him. He was almost recovered by that point and had started training, doing some weight training exercises he had found in a book on jujitsu that had made it into the paper piles. He was exercising on our roof when I gave him the newspaper. He read it quietly for about a minute, making a few angry faces. Then he saw a picture of Sufyan el Amr that had been placed into the middle of the article. His eyes widened and he started shaking. I asked him what was wrong and he pointed to a younger man with a moustache standing just behind Sufyan el Amr.”

“‘That’s the man who shot me,’ he hissed. ‘Him! He’s the one!’”

“We read the caption and realized it was Mohsen Sufyan. We knew him by reputation as the drug dealer’s second eldest son. He ripped that paper to shreds and crushed it with his left foot. To be honest, I was also infuriated but not nearly as much as Anwar.”

“I knew Sheikh Jibril and admired him, but I think Anwar loved him like a second father. After the trial, he lost him to the authorities and corruption in our society like he had his own father. In the past I used to wonder when he really became the man he would be, the man everyone knew as the Struggler. Sometimes I thought it was when he met Jibril, or maybe when his mother died. For a while I thought it was the day he saw Sufyan in the paper shaking hands with Sheikh Jibril’s judge and prosecutor. Now though, I’m not sure if I can say there was a moment that changed him but rather a moment that opened his eyes to what he was supposed to do. He didn’t want to belong to a world this full of corruption and repression; he wanted a world with justice and he’d give his all to make it happen.”

١٣ Thirteen١٣ 

“I thought he’d be in a wheelchair,” rked Girgis from behind Ramez’s chair. “He’d get sympathy that way.”

Asher didn’t agree. In his opinion, the sight of Hosni Mubarak’s crumpled face looking out between the iron bars of his cage could squeeze at least a drop of pity from a person, but only a drop.

The commotion inside the courtroom had been building at a steady pace throughout the morning of this trial. A hive of lawyers zipped in and around the wooden benches or near the front banister just below the judges’ seat. They consulted in small huddles amongst themselves as the cameras kept their focus on the large cage that been erected that morning to hold the ten defendants. Cameras had also been rolling outside, panning over the pro- and anti-Mubarak demonstrators outside the front entrance of the building and over the back, which was swarming with officers and police lorries. The two mobs, who had clashed with each other only a few hours earlier, had been separated by lines of riot police.

It was the arrival of the first set of defendants that caused the first round of commotion. Dressed in blue prison uniforms, six former police officials filed in quietly from a door at the back of the cage, led by their former boss, ex-interior minister Habib el Adly. The men took their seats on benches behind the bars, as defense lawyers shouted from the banister in their dark robes and ties, calling out a slew of legal technicalities and pleas to the judges who tried in vain to shout them down and maintain order.

The commotion took a sudden hiatus when two figures in white outfits emerged from the room behind the door that led to the cage. The scrawny forms of Gamal and Alaa, the ex-president’s two sons, lingered as a gurney was brought in behind them. Mubarak’s beady visage briefly poked out from behind his two sons before they all entered the cage.

The courtroom went deathly quiet as the former strong man of Egypt was wheeled in. Thin and weary, he blinked morosely at the cameras that were trying to slide in between the bars and the crossed arms of his sons to capture his face. The stillness had barely arrived however, when it was shattered by a whirlwind of new accusations, charges, legal gambits, and appeals from the horde of lawyers. The commotion continued even as chief judge Ahmed Refaat read out the first defendant’s charges. The former president’s reply that he was not responsible for economic corruption and killing demonstrators during the revolution was brief. He denied everything, speaking his plea into a microphone as his sons continued to stand between him and the court like scrawny bouncers. They, along with the potbellied Adly and his policemen, also denied all charges.

Asher and his colleagues had been spellbound that entire morning, glued to the monitors of streaming-savvy colleagues who had been able to find a live site connected to State TV’s broadcast signal. The bulk of the designers, marketers and managers watched in the designers’ quarter, while the service staff watched from a computer in the meeting room. Asher bounced back and forth between the two every so often to gauge the differences in reaction. There were almost none; everyone seemed both relieved and somehow unsatisfied at the same moment. The trial many had thought might not happen was going ahead, courtesy of a wary SCAF, yet there were a lot of doubts about the army’s intentions.

“His friend Tantawi won’t have him executed,” Khaled growled as one of the defense lawyers argued that Mubarak had died in 2004 and that a DNA test was needed.

Nader, one of the other couriers, agreed.

“I hate all these men,” he told Asher unabashedly a few moments later. “I hope they find them guilty. Maybe they’ll send them all back to Sharm again, but they’d better not. I didn’t get tear gassed for nothing.”

As the lawyers began the chaotic shouting match they called cases, people gradually drifted back to work, losing interest in the onslaught of legal jargon. Only Malek and the service staff continued to watch.

Asher joined the tide and went back to his own desk. As he walked to his own wing, he couldn’t help but remember Sheikh Jibril’s trial. He wondered if any of the police captains in the cage along with Adly and Mubarak had helped arrange his arrest and imprisonment.

He doubted it, but ever since he had finally submitted and begun diving into the documents on Kareem’s flash drive, he found he was often thinking in conspiratorial ways. He now kept the stick with him wherever he went, rereading the parts he had finished again and again as he tried to understand what everything meant.

At his desk, he made another sweep over the early and adolescent years of Anwar’s life.

The unfolding story, and the surreal and captivating direction it was taking, had raised a lot questions, not about the story itself, but about Kareem. It tended to make his reading pace a little slow.

He had first wondered how the full time bread winner (literally) had found time for the research, interviews and expeditions. He concluded fairly quickly that it was an easy enough question to answer. Kareem was an intelligent man and had worked part time as a freelance writer. His people skills, along with an inquisitive mind had probably served him well in convincing people he was a trustworthy man who could be talked to.

Still, it was this sociable personality that led Asher to other questions, such as why and how Kareem had been able to keep such a huge part of his life secret for so long. It was actually slightly irritating to Asher that his closest Egyptian friend had never mentioned this project, one which seemed to have defined so much of who he was for reasons that were still murky.

At the same time, Asher was the final recipient of the documents and one of two people who knew about them. Ayman, who was still unreachable a month after Asher had started reading, had undoubtedly been through them as well. Ayman’s silence, although aggravating, was also a bit welcome.

Asher was having a hard time moving through the accounts and didn’t need the pestering. He had been swamped with a summer magazine, his first solo project without Karen. Nermeen’s presence in his life had also grown dramatically over the last few weeks. They had gone out several times and she was now coming over for a pasta dinner at his flat that evening. He had invited Tamer as well, while Peter and Monica were supposed to bring the wine.

Knowing he might be stuck at his office all night if he dwelled on his dinner and his friend’s mystery, Asher had to use every ounce of willpower to stay focused. When he tried, though, a new event in the trial would abruptly draw the attention of every person back to the monitors. Inevitably, Asher’s would bounce away from Mubarak and Anwar again, and he would return to reading the next part of the story. By the time four o clock hit he still had several files to sort.

Unsure of what his new boss, who only stepped out of her office every hour or so to smoke on the balcony, would think, Asher dawdled at his desk for several minutes. Mustafa’s increasingly erratic excuses to a client on the phone muddled his decision making. He was no closer to a resolution when Malek’s plump face entered the room.

“Did you see what happened at the trial?”

With the other account executives absorbed in their work, Asher was the only one who could listen.

“A policeman shook hands with Habib El Adly as he left the courtroom…he shook his hand!!! I don’t believe it!”

“It makes sense,” Asher replied. “It’s like saying hi to the old boss.”

He sounded a bit cold. Asher wished sometimes he conveyed more feeling in his voice.

Malek didn’t seem to mind.

“I’m going to break Iftar in Giza with Khaled. Do you want to come? Come on, it’ll be a great experience.”

Ramadan had started three days earlier. Most of the Muslim staff were taking advantage of the Ramadan hours to leave work early at around three o clock.

“No,” he said, “I’m meeting some people.”

“Okay, I can give you a ride to Dokki. It’s on the way.”

Asher glanced back at the files on his desk. They could wait until tomorrow.

“Alright,” he agreed, taking the USB drive with him.

They managed to slip through a pocket of traffic and make it to his home in half an hour. By the time he got into his flat, Peter and Monica were already cooking.

“Where have you been?” Peter asked, after tossing a pair of chicken fillets into a skillet.

“Work was long and I forgot to phone,” Asher said, immediately grabbing a knife. “Sorry.”

He’d been more forgetful lately as well, less considerate. Anwar’s story was always on his mind. Nermeen showed up a few minutes later, bringing a small nutella feteera for desert. She backed away when Asher tried to kiss her. Asher was taken aback, but he quickly caught on that Peter had been in the hallway, briefly standing clear of the pepper rising from the stovetop. Their relationship was often full of these cross-cultural misdemeanors.

Despite the awkward moment, Nermeen jumped in and helped in the kitchen. She was as talkative and friendly as ever as they finished cooking and set the table. By then it was about twenty minutes after Iftar and Tamer was late by about an hour. Asher gave him a call. He didn’t pick up, but that wasn’t a surprise. He had said he would be on a shoot, covering a meeting between one of the activist groups he was working for and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Though he didn’t want to start without his friend, Asher could see the ravenous eyes of the others darting from dish to dish, their appetite disguised by a thin veil of chit chat. He gave Tamer one more call on his mobile. When there was no answer, he sent him an SMS and told him they would go ahead and eat, but would save him some food.

The pasta was rapidly depleted, along with the sauce and salad. As Nermeen and Monica discussed her background in graphics, Asher began to get a little impatient. Then, as they were getting ready to break out the wine, the doorbell rang. When he opened the door, Asher could barely recognize his friend’s bloodshot eyes peering through his glasses.

“I apologize, friend,” he croaked. “The meeting was a lot longer than I thought it would be.”

Asher’s irritation disappeared. Tamer’s clothes seem to hang off him like stretched out skin. He looked as if he had just emerged from an underground dungeon.

Feeling sorry he had ever been upset, Asher invited his friend in. Despite his obvious exhaustion, Tamer greeted the others warmly at the table, graciously accepting a plate of food, slowly taking bite after bite as the conversation changed to politics, specifically to the trial.

“I didn’t think it would happen, honestly,” Nermeen said. “I thought he would just stay under house arrest until the day he died, sitting in Sharm El Sheikh sipping lemonade with some Russian tourists.”

“If they were Russians, they probably wouldn’t be drinking lemonade,” Peter chimed in.

The joke got a few laughs from everyone at the table.

“It’s a historic day, that’s for sure,” Asher commented.

“Well, friend,” Tamer interjected, “let’s wait and see if the court actually comes together again in two weeks, or if Mubarak contracts some mysterious sickness that postpones the trial forever.”

He took a drink of water from his glass and continued.

“You know, it all seems like we are just barely.

Asher could tell Tamer’s lack of energy was affecting his English. “I’m sorry?” he said.

Tamer reached under his glasses and wiped his eyes. Something in the way he coughed told Asher a mini-dissertation was about to emerge from Tamer’s lips.

“I mean this. Mubarak is on trial, Alhamdulilah, and yes, so are his sons and Adly. The demonstrators made that happen with their protests. Sometimes, I just think there are too many thugs in this country, too many corrupt men to be locked away. It also seems like every other week we have to return to the Square to demand something from the army. If there are enough of us they cave in; if not they send the military police to swat us away like flies. We had enough of a crowd to make them take action on Mubarak, but not enough to release the people the army’s taken since February and not enough to make them take down the emergency laws.”

Asher exchanged looks with Nermeen. Peter and Monica’s gaze was fixed on Tamer as he continued. “You know, sometimes all I think these demonstrations are doing is giving us the chance to relive what we had on Jan. 25.”

Tamer closed his eyes for a few moments and then opened them again. He smiled and grinned.

“Malesh, life is life.” He laughed, seeming to have awakened from his trancelike rant.

Asher smiled politely. Peter asked a few more follow up questions about Tamer’s views on the Revolution and which other people he thought should be arrested. Tamer gave only a few names before Monica changed topics to Ramadan TV programs. Asher could scarcely pay attention to the new conversation. He watched Tamer’s eyes gradually glaze over as the night wore on.

At around 10:00 Peter left with Monica to take her back to her apartment. Asher, Nermeen and Tamer were the ones who would clean up. Asher carried the dishes to the sink. As Nermeen began washing, Tamer, at the table, was slowly rising up out of his chair.

“Can you keep washing? I want to talk to him alone,” he whispered to Nermeen.

“I think he’s okay,” she replied. “Maybe just fatigued.”

“Well, yeah, he’s fatigued, but I just want to talk to him.”

“Okay,” Nermeen answered.

She seemed irritated; Asher wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t dwell on it.

He returned to the dining table and gently pushed Tamer over into the sitting room by the shoulder.

“Are you okay, man?” Asher asked as they sat down.

Tamer nodded, scratching at some loose fibers on the couch.

“The meeting just started to make me think about what’s happening here,” he replied in Arabic.

“What happened?” Asher asked in Tamer’s mother tongue.

“It started out all right,” he recalled. “Both the Ikwhen and the Revolution Front agreed that all parties should remain true to the spirit of January 25 and that Egypt should be a great country that embraces democracy. Then came the first topic − the place of religion in the new government. The Brothers wanted their religion, their Islam to be the umbrella for all society. Then, when the Revolution Front disagreed, one of the speakers from the Ikwhen said, ‘That was what we had all fought for.’ That’s what we all fought for; those were his words exactly. You can imagine what happened after that.”

Asher nodded. “I can.”

“How can they say that? That’s what we all fought for; all of us? They didn’t even start it. They didn’t go out into the streets until after they were cleared. Now suddenly, the Islamists are the captains of the Revolution? It’s like the Rally for Unity; it was supposed to be a day for all parties to come together, yet the Islamists pushed everyone else away. I fought for liberation, for democracy, for cheap bread and good education. That’s what we all fought for…wasn’t it…those basic rights and needs?”

Asher wasn’t sure if Tamer’s question was directed at him or not. He thought it seemed like a rhetorical one.

“I’m sorry,” Asher said.

Tamer shook his head and laughed. “Don’t worry. We’ll just have to make sure they don’t convince people with their ‘Islam is the Solution’ slogan in the parliamentary elections.”

Asher nodded and perked his ears. Water was still running in the kitchen.

“Can I ask you something?”

Asher didn’t hear him, so Tamer had to repeat himself.

“Of course.”

“Why are you here still?”

Asher sank into the Louis XIV style cushions. This was a question he usually tried to avoid at all costs. “I’ve told you,” he said. “I love Egypt.”

“Does this mean you hate America?” Tamer wondered.

Asher’s response came instantly.“No, it means I don’t think of America as my home.”

“Egypt’s a very hard place to call home.”

Asher smirked.“It is what it is; for me that’s enough to want to stay. Besides, I need to see what becomes of this whole Revolution. I’m looking for what lies across the other side of this sea we’re…you’re… trying to cross.”

“Me too,” Tamer said in English. “Our captain was a tyrant; we mutinied and threw him overboard but broke our boat in the process. Now, we need to build a new one on the open ocean.”

“Is that from anything?”

“No,” Tamer smirked. “Just my own thoughts.”

Asher turned his head and looked out his balcony and onto the streets below.

 

١٤ Fourteen١٤

“What makes a shit holy?” Mustafa wondered.

Asher had to ask him to repeat the question.

“You always say that in the movies. Holy shit, holy crap and so on, but where does that come from? Why on earth would anything like shit be holy?”

Neveen glanced up from her sandwich; her own interest was piqued.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Asher replied. “There are lots of words like that, where you don’t know the origins; I’m sure there are a few in Arabic as well.”

“Of course.”

There were many times when Asher felt he should have known more about the English language. A bit of etymology like this was moot, of course, but he wished he understood grammar better. Usually he just played around with words, shifting their positions until it sounded fine to him. He often wondered if that was too amateurish of him and if he should try and embrace the mantra of creative writing professors that one needed to fully understand the rules of English before breaking them.

Maybe it might have helped him piece together simple slogans and phrases that could have better satisfied his Egyptian clients. He was sure the string of overdue copy projects was the reason their new boss had asked him to stop by her office after lunch.

He took sloth-like nibbles from his bowl of koshary as Neveen and Mustafa discussed one of their own projects that was also a month overdue, their plates empty. Asher was sure he could take his time in heading towards the large office just a few footsteps away. Maha, as usual, had not set a specific time for him to come over. He scraped the last bit of pasta from his bowl and dropped it off at the buffet before slowly making his way to the front door.

Maha, dressed in one of her tighter blouses, was staring at Karen’s old Macintosh monitor when he walked in.

“Asher!” she said, blinking her eyes and pausing slightly as she usually did after a new person walked through the door. “How are you?”

“Fine,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” she said, flashing him a smile with her charcoal teeth.

She paused again, collecting her thoughts, or so Asher supposed.

“So,” she said, clasping her hands together. “Asher, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Ok.”

“You know the magazine you handle?”

“Which one?”

“Hurghada Daily.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been sending emails out to advertisers without cc’ing me.”

Asher was beginning to shrink a little as Maha’s voice got higher.

“What email are you referring to?”

Maha glanced back at her computer. Her eyes moved up and down.

“One moment,” she said, suddenly smiling again.

Asher waited for almost two minutes before she finally pulled up the message. Asher read its contents.

“That was an oversight,” he said. “I only realized you weren’t cc’d in that chain today, so I started to doing so.”

“Well, why did you forget?”

There was a sharpness in her voice that made Asher shiver.

“I just forgot. I’m sorry”

“How could you forget ya Asha! I am with you!”

The sudden scream would have made Asher jump up if the crash produced by Maha’s palm striking the desk hadn’t locked him in his place.

Maha’s eyes and mouth were opened and hanging as if waiting for him to say something more.

Asher didn’t know what else to say.

“Look, please cc me from now on, okay? It’s vital I know everything going on at the company. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do.”

Alhamdulillah, the creative directors suddenly appeared at the door. Maha’s face abruptly went from indignant to beaming.

“Okay, Asher, thank you; that’s all for now. The directors and I have a meeting; new policy.”

Flabbergasted, Asher left the room, walking past the trio of directors who shut the door behind them. He returned to his desk with a stone inside him. Talking to Maha was almost always an exhausting task for him, especially when he did mess up or there was some issue with a client. He wondered if the saga of the Struggler had been absorbing him far too much lately.

It wasn’t that he spent all his time reading; the documents weren’t that long actually. It was as if the story, its people, had infiltrated his body like a virus, infecting his mind so deeply that it was all he could ever dwell on when he wasn’t being directly spoken to. He had even been dreaming of Anwar and Moqattam recently. Last night, he had dreamt about wandering down narrow corridors of refuse that lined its streets, chasing a distant figure in a red and black kefeyah but never catching him. On the street, he would lose himself in thought whenever he spotted one of the zabaleen carrying their overstuffed garbage sacks on gurneys or the beds of their donkey carts. He’d wonder if they had seen the Struggler or if perhaps he was looking at Anwar himself or Abu Bakr or one of their children or grandchildren.

“How’s the filing?” Asmaa suddenly asked, after materializing in front of his monitor.

It was only then that Asher realized he had just spent the last forty minutes zoned out, recalling his own thoughts.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I’ll have to stay later again to catch up.”

Asmaa lingered.

“Is there something else?”

“Just don’t think too much, okay?”

Asher smiled.

“I will if you stop focusing so much on the news.”

It seemed as if everyone he knew in Egypt was glued to their monitors for the latest political crisis or clash. The most recent debacle was the death of Egyptian border guards by the IDF after they pursued some militants who had attacked a bus and a car inside Israel over the border into the Sinai. Asmaa and some of the other staff had railed against the Israeli army that morning.

“If someone kills our sons, I’ll always raise my voice. Sadat never consulted us when he signed that damn treaty with them in the first place.”

Asher nodded and just kept quiet. It was a fool’s errand to try and have a rational conversation about Israel in light of what had happened. He’d have to wait a while.

Asher spent the better part of the rest of his afternoon working on his files, something he probably could have gotten done earlier had he not spaced out again. Mustafa and Rasha left at about 5:00, leaving him with his last three projects. He had just finished placing the DVD inside the sleeve of the last file when his mobile rang.

It was Nermeen. “Hi honey,” she said. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the office. I had to work a little later than usual.”

“You sound a little distant.”

She had been saying that a lot lately.

“I have a lot on my mind.”

“You can tell me if you want.”

Asher had kept everything about Kareem’s USB drive a secret from her.

“No, it’s okay really; are you coming over again?”

The last time she had stopped in at the flat, they had had a brief encounter that hadn’t satisfied her. He was eager to make up for it.

“I don’t know, Ash. Honestly, you’ve just seemed so cold these last two weeks.”

Asher leaned back in his chair. He could hear Nader playing some Upper Egyptian music on his mobile phone in the buffet area. He was sure they were the only two left on that side of the office.

“I know; I’m sorry,” he said.

“I know, you’re sorry,” she said, her voice rising in agitation. “But couldn’t you have called more? Couldn’t you have checked in on me more?”

“I’ve just had a lot to deal with.” Asher was beginning to get irritated with how needy Nermeen was becoming. It was one of the reasons he hadn’t been calling her every two days like he used to.

“I care about you.”

“Then show it! The other night you chose to go out with your friend Tamer rather than see me.”

“I hadn’t seen him for a while. I had seen you the night before. I thought you said you understood.”

“I understand; I understand you care more about your friends then you do about me.”

Asher could feel his blood suddenly boil, but he kept his voice level. He knew she was just trying to hurt him now. Reason had completely left the conversation.

“I’m going to hang up now,” he said. “Please call me later when you’re calmer.”

Asher didn’t wait for her answer; he shut off his mobile. He checked the time on his desktop. It was almost 7:00. He slipped the files onto Maha’s desk and checked out of the office, leaving Nader to lock up.

Feeling utterly emasculated by the day’s events, Asher bought some liquid medicine from the nearby Drinkies and grabbed a cab home. He disappeared into his room, switched on the AC and began to drink the six bottles of Sakkara Gold in his black plastic bag. He reviewed his latest blog post, reflecting on the Israeli incursion into the Sinai and what it might mean for Egypt, adding a link at the end to a short video showing throngs of demonstrators that had begun to camp outside the Israeli embassy building in Giza.

The beers quickly turned his thoughts into bubbles; in fact it was as if he was immersed in a sea of comfort. He had printed out a copy of the last two collections of PDFs entitled the Struggler. The story had been divided into four acts or so it seemed, and Asher had been careful to read them in sequence according to the numbers on each of the file names. He had preferred reading the parts one section at a time. With everything that was happening though, he quickly decided it was better if he finished off the entire issue in one night, if the beer didn’t put him to sleep first.

He settled in for the next chapter of the story when his phone rang. It was Nermeen again, sounding far less angry.

“I’m sorry for what I said. I was really unfair.”

“That’s okay,” Asher said, trying his hardest not to slur his Arabic.

“I can’t come over tonight, but I still want to come with you to Aswan next month for your trip.”

“Sure, no worries.”

There was a long pause, permeated with heavy breathing on both sides of the lines.

“Asher, don’t be less…passionate, okay?” Nermeen said in English.

“What?”

“I don’t see your passion anymore; not like before.”

Asher glanced down at the second to last act lying beside him in the bed. He wondered if what he was doing could be construed as cheating on his girlfriend. He nearly laughed at the thought.

“I’ll be passionate again, I promise you,” he said in Arabic. “It won’t be long.”

“I will wait, but I can’t wait forever. Good night, honey.”

“Good night.”

Life as the Struggler

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Sufyan el Amr was one of three prominent drug dealers in Moqattam. He was not in the Columbian or Mexican sense of the word a drug lord; in fact he had no regular paid thugs or enforcers and lived only in a small house just on the opposite side of the hill. What made Sufyan el Amr powerful and especially dangerous was his background. He was a retired State Security agent with wide connections inside Egypt’s police apparatus and its ‘Deep State’.

It came as little surprise then, that he would help his old friends in the police by testifying against the fiery and outspoken Sheikh Jibril Suleiman at his trial in 1988. It also wasn’t a surprise to many that a few weeks later a force of State Security agents raided the home of his main rival in the Moqattam drug trade. Subsequently, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison and Sufyan became the defacto ruler of Moqattam, with nearly every nearby police officer and precinct on his payroll. It was rumored State Security had received healthy compensation for taking down his main rival. A violent man who knew when to use force, Sufyan cut a deal with the area’s other drug dealer, Suhayl Ismail, dividing up the turf where they would sell their methamphetamines and heroine. Suhayl took the eastern part of the mountain while Sufyan controlled the west. Their sons, who acted as their dealers and enforcers, kept an eye on business.

While petty crime in Egypt has always tended to be low, our country is sadly a major destination for drugs, which many people use to escape their despair at the world they live in.

For two years Suhayl and Sufyan’s arrangement was undisturbed. Their families profited from the drug trade even as the government began to try and clamp down on the growing rumblings of conservative sheikhs, angry at their country’s alignment with America in the brewing crisis in Iraq and Kuwait. The news of Gama Islamiyya’s declaration of war against the government, though, had little impact on Suhayl’s business, apart from causing a temporary spike in demand.

Then one night, in the summer of 1990, Suhayl got a piece of disturbing news from one of his sons. He had been making a deal in a back corner alley when a man in a black jacket with a red and black kefeyah and a black mask appeared out of the darkness. He had beaten him almost unconscious, broken both his legs and his wrists and had taken the five kilos worth of heroine he’d had on him at the time. Rather than taking the drugs and reselling them, the man had dumped them into a can of petrol and lit them on fire. He had then walked off without a word.

One of Sufyan’s other sons, who wanted to remain anonymous, would tell me years later how much the incident rattled his father’s calm.

“It wasn’t just that Mohsen had been hurt or that some of our money was lost, though of course beating a man’s son in the open like that is a serious offence. It was the entire nature of the attack; it was so different, so inhuman. Nothing was stolen and no reason was given.”

Sufyan held a conference with Suhayl. There were no accusations or finger pointing on the part of Sufyan. He found it impossible to believe his fellow dealer would break their agreement in such a blatant and foolish display. His assertions were proven right when Suhayl revealed that a few of his own dealers had been attacked in a similar manner a week earlier. They had been four and had all been beaten senseless by a man wearing a black mask under a red and black kefeyah. Their drugs and money were taken and burned. He had chosen to keep it quiet lest other rivals take notice and interpret it as a sign that his business was weak.

Believing they were under attack by another gang or possibly some self-declared moral policeman, the two elders of their families agreed to cooperate to track down their shadowy new stalker. They bought new weapons, hired thugs to tag along with their dealers and sons, and informed their well-connected friends in government about their strange new predicament.

Despite their efforts, the shadowy figure vanished for almost two months and business went back to usual. Moqattam residents continued to buy drugs in droves, fueling a upsurge in profits. By September they were swamped with money and began gallivanting across Haram Street in brand new sports cars. They were a well-known terror to club and café owners. The mention of their names could spark the same kind of fear among club owners as the police.

“They could do just about anything to anyone they wanted,” recounted Azem Somr, owner of the Ramses Dance Club. “We couldn’t throw the filth out or else their father could put us all in prison. You had to put up with them just like the men in black with their bribes.”

One night, after cavorting with unidentified young women at the Ramses, three of Sufyan’s five sons including Mohsen, Akbar, and Adham, walked down the street towards their cars. They soon came screaming back to the club.

“They came straight up to me and asked what had happened to their cars,” reported Azem Somr. “I swear to God, I told them I had no idea what they were talking about. I followed them out of the club to the street and down a few meters to where they had parked. It was a strange thing that I saw. Each of the gentlemen owned a car. Adham’s, the blue one, was at the back of their convoy. Someone had smashed the windows, broken the headlights and scorched the insides. The second car, Akbar’s, was a red Lamborghini. It was covered in blood, what kind I don’t know. I suppose it was some sort of animal. The last car, Mohsen’s was the worst damaged. The glass was broken, the tires slashed and every part of the surface had been beaten in with some sort of blunt object. A message had been carved in the hood of the car.”

The exact words have unfortunately been lost, but according to Sufyan’s son it was addressed to Sufyan, his family and his business associates and essentially covered … points.

“First, he wanted us to know he knew our business and what we stood for. Second, he said he was a single man determined to get rid of corruption in society. It was funny, though, because he then said he would give us all a chance to leave the drug business and abandon Moqattam. His logic was that the authorities had created the environment and conditions for our corruption and had encouraged our business as a way to make money for themselves and suppress the righteous. It was the authorities he wanted to hurt most; the drug dealers seemed like a first step for him. He said if we didn’t stop dealing drugs, within a week he was going to destroy our homes and make sure we could never harm anyone ever again.

“That was the spirit of his message. To my knowledge no one saw who wrecked my brothers’ cars, or no one ever came forward about it anyway. We had a reputation for mischief. It didn’t make us popular.”

The ‘mischief’ of the Sufyan family would abruptly explode. The next morning police raided several houses in Moqattam. Abu Bakr, by then a university graduate trying to find funds for a new recycling plant recalls that time.

“We thought at first they were looking for Islamists or terrorists. They had swept through the area a few times before but not as much as other places in Cairo or Upper Egypt. Then we noticed they were also taking some Copts away. That tipped us off; we knew they were looking for the man in the black mask.”

Rumors about the new vigilante had been blowing through the Moqattam area as well.

“People began to hear from their neighbors about what had happened to Mohsen, Sufyan and Suhayl’s dealers. After the cars of Sufyan’s sons were vandalized and the police searched us, people only started to feel more sympathy for the man. I think that’s why everyone was so uncooperative with the authorities.”

The search was, according to Abu Bakr and local residents, largely a random sweep that targeted men who were suspected of having disliked Sufyan in the past. Hussein Baky was one of those taken.

“I had discouraged local kids from taking his drugs,” he said from the doorway of his small home, only a stone’s throw from where his deaf daughter had been assaulted. “I was having tea in my home when they came for me. I thought Suhayl had taken his revenge when his son attacked my daughter, but I guess it wasn’t so.”

Baky, along with eight others, was taken from Moqattam to the Saif el Adel police station near the City of the Dead. The station was abandoned soon after and no longer stands, buried beneath the expanding shanties and graveside homes of nearby residents.

At the time, the station was the headquarters of both the regular police and State Security for Moqattam. Baky recalls when he and the others were first brought in for questioning.

“The ride to the station was like passing through hellfire. We were on our knees in the back of the truck and the officers were standing over us. They would chat and smoke for a while and then for no reason at all just start hitting one of us. Then they would stop and go back to talking about their wives and families. It was like they had to be cruel to us every so often; like it was required for their job.

“When the truck finally stopped, they took us out into an open compound where they parked their cars. They took us inside a three story building, past an iron gate with the eagle on it. There was a man there just inside the gate with about a dozen chains slung over his shoulder. He clamped them on us and then they took us down a hall to a large room. They took all our belongings and then left us in the room alone. We couldn’t speak; if we tried to, an officer at the door would hear us and give us a few hits with his club.”

Everyone in Egypt knows exactly what kind of treatment to expect when they enter a police station in this country. It’s another world behind those walls; the lights are all bright and white. It’s like you have eyes constantly beating down on you. Soon, you can’t remember anything on the outside −not your family, not your home, not your street or your meal; every thought or memory you ever had outside that small tiled room disappears. All you can think about is the steel rubbing against your wrists and ankles, the ringing in your ears after the sergeant claps your face from both sides, the sweat dripping from your nose onto the floor as you wait for your turn in line. It’s not just about breaking your spirit; it’s about wiping your memory, making you forget that you were anything other than an interrogation subject.

One by one, the men from Moqattam were dragged out and taken to another room for interrogation.

“They dragged another one out as soon as they pulled one back in,” Mr. Baky said. “They would pass each other just in front of the door. Maybe it was a way to warn those who were about to go in. When it was finally my turn to go, I looked at the face of the man returning and saw a burn mark on his left brow. He was a young man, quite young. I don’t even think he was out of secondary school. He stared back at me and I could see a tear rolling down the left side of his face. It’s a disgusting thing to see a young man cry; it’s even more disgusting when you know he has every reason to.

“I was taken from the hall to the second floor where there was a smaller waiting room. Two men were sitting behind a desk while the commander of the station, Shafiq Mahmud, was standing behind them in his white uniform, stars and badges, everything. Before they sat me down I noticed another man in a suit standing off in a corner just across from the desk. He had very flashy clothes and his undershirt was unbuttoned. I didn’t think he was a policeman.

“The men at the table told me they were from State Security and that they had proof I was supporting the masked ‘terrorist’ who had been attacking local residents. When I told them the truth, that I knew nothing, that’s when it started. They stood me up and started walking around me, smacking me with electrical wires…”

At that point Mr. Baky refused to continue his descriptions of the torture or the course of his interrogation. He would only recount a discussion that took place between the man in the suit and police commander Mahmud at the end of the session.

“I was on my back,” he remembered with glassy eyes, “looking up at the ceiling, when I heard the man in the corner walk behind me.”

“‘This isn’t working,’ he complained to the commander. ‘None of these men know anything.’

“The commander shuffled over from behind the desk. I could see him smiling widely, lowering his head like an apologetic waiter.

“‘Ustase, Akbar,’ he said. ‘We have information from good sources that these men know the identity of the terrorist.’

“‘Your sources are wrong and this is a waste of time!’ the man in the flashy suit said. ‘If you can’t produce results, then my father and I will find another way to stop this kafr. I expect you to produce something if you and your men want to stay on his good side.’

“The commander’s smile soon faded. He looked at him sternly.

“‘Your father and I were brothers at the police academy. You’d do well to remember which one of us wears the stars and which one of us really stands tallest in this room. We will track this man in black down and we will make sure he never challenges us again. Tell your father we will do our jobs even if none of these jackasses turn up useful information.’

“What he meant was, ‘I could throw you and your whole family in prison with a phone call or a wave of my hand.’ I couldn’t see Akbar’s reaction, but I think he remembered his place because he stepped over me and left the room without a word.

As soon as he was gone, the commander slammed his hand on the table. He ordered a pair of officers at the door to take me back to the room. I was so thirsty I started swallowing the blood in my mouth without even really thinking about what I was doing. It tasted so hot; hot and bitter.”

Mr. Baky and the others were kept in the station for another day without food or drink before being released. They had to get back home themselves.

“Moqattam was so beautiful to us. A garbage dump looks beautiful compared to a dungeon; sunlight is beautiful no matter where it shines.”

The men reached their homes in Garbage City about an hour later and were greeted by a mob of relatives and neighbors. Yet for the next week hardly anyone spoke about the injustice the men had suffered. No one publicized the event to the Egyptian media, all controlled by the state, or protested against their treatment. Men like Hussein Baky went limping back to their lives, whispering their pain only within the confines of their homes. Despite their bitterness and pain, none dared to confront their aggressors.

Then on September 15^th, a local newspaper, Al Shabiha, published a letter that had been sent to their offices two days earlier. The words below are the exact ones which appeared in the letter that day in 1990.

To the citizens of the Moqattam area, from your brother the vigilante some refer to as ‘the man in the black mask’.

Last week, nine of your men were taken to a nearby police station. The authorities were, as I’m sure you realize, trying to capture me following the actions I took against members of the Sufyan and Suhayl clans. I have it on good authority that these men were systematically tortured by officers after they were arrested without charge.

This should come as no surprise to you. Torture, degradation, abuse, extortion and all the evils of men have become so common we no longer see the horror in them; we have forgotten what it meant to be true men, for true men no longer rule over us. We have forgotten our own power, the strength of the Egyptian people, by tolerating the unrighteous and the corrupt.

By striking Sufyan and Suhayl I have attempted to fight against the corruption of powerful men and undercut the wealth of the corrupt men above them.

When the leaders of our land act out of injustice and stray from the path we, as believers, have the obligation to overthrow them and bring the center back together. Unity, through the struggle. This struggle I have undertaken is one which we all have to undertake. I know many of you are not ready; you are still either scared or, more likely, apathetic, believing your lives are completely out of your hands. You may say ‘Life is Life,’ but I say differently. This life we live is not the life handed to us but the life we have allowed to be handed to us.

I shall not force you to join me, but know that should you suffer on my behalf, as some of you have already done, I shall avenge your injustices with the help of our God and the teachings of his glorious messenger, may peace be upon him.

I am not a Muslim Brother or a militant. I am merely a man, a man with few prospects in this world whose only recourse is to destroy those who shut the doors around him. Come to the top of the Moqattam Mountain six days from now in the morning at the dawn prayer and see some of your oppressors receive their just punishment. We shall be vindicated by our own hands and make the world safe for us and our children once more.

In Your Name and No Others,
The Struggler

The reaction of men and women in Moqattam to the letter was not uniform, according to Abu Bakr.

“I think a lot of people were confused by it, more than anything else. He didn’t speak from an Islamist standpoint, not exactly, but he wasn’t a socialist either. I think people weren’t sure who this ‘Struggler’ really was. That’s probably what started all the new rumors and conspiracy theories; that sense of uncertainty. People started calling him an agent for the Iranians, or a government assassin meant to start some sort of uprising so the authorities would have an excuse to clamp down. People also suggested he was an Israeli or Saudi sent to undermine Egypt’s stability so that one or both of the countries could benefit.”

Regardless of what people thought of the nature of the Struggler, there was no doubt his pledge to hold the authorities −along with Suhayl and Sufyan− accountable caused stir, even outside of Garbage City itself. However, media attention was scant due to intense government pressure on the media not to publicize the story. The managing editor of Al Shabiha, who had authorized the publishing of the letter, was fined and briefly interrogated by local officers the day after the issue went to print.

“We didn’t talk about this even among ourselves,” Sufyan’s son would say later. “But we were very scared of what might happen to us. That’s why we went into hiding, after the Struggler gave his promise. That’s why Commander Mahmud started putting uniformed officers all around the mountain to keep an eye out for anyone suspicious.”

September 21^st soon arrived. Almost a third of the area’s police officers were deployed on the small dusty hillsides overlooking Cairo. Despite the gossip and talk generated by the article, only a few dozen people appeared at the hill before the dawn prayer to see if the Struggler would keep his word. Among them were Abu Bakr, his father and mother, Hussein Baky and his daughter Fatimah, and the eight other men who had been detained and captured by the police.

The crowd made its way up around the hillside, passing by the Monastery of St Simon and the dozens of officers who vigilantly watched for the masked man to appear. The crowd headed for the summit and waited. They looked out over their homes and garbage strewn streets.

“I had never seen our Garbage City from that high up,” Abu Bakr told me. “It was so strange to see all our brick homes just standing there like children’s blocks among all the garbage. Then you could look off into the rest of Cairo, with its highways and the great old fortress of Salahudin with its Turkish mosques and rocket shaped minarets. I felt like I was looking at all of Egypt. All of it.”

The crowd waited for almost an hour. A small group of officers, according to Hussein Baky, came over and asked for cigarettes.

“I couldn’t give them willingly,” he recounted. “So my daughter handed the officers a pair of sticks from my pack. It was strange because I felt bad for not giving them willingly. I’m honestly not sure why.”

Not long after, the quiet of early morning was broken by the dawn prayer coming from one of the many mosques in Moqattam.

“I think there was a new muezzin at each of the mosques that day as the call was more beautiful than usual,” said Abu Bakr. “It seemed to go perfectly with the soft light.”

That softness vanished with a flash and a rumble. From the nearby City of the Dead, a flame slit the air just in front of the horizon, while a bellow like a lion’s roar momentarily drowned out the last ‘Allahu Akbars’.

Via Hussein Baky: “We didn’t really know what we had seen until the radios of the policemen nearby started going crazy. There were voices shouting on almost every frequency, screams and calls for support! In a few minutes the officers on the mountains were rushing for their trucks and lorries; they drove off heading towards the City of the Dead. Soon we were the only people left on the mountain. We figured out pretty quickly that the police station had been attacked.”

Via Abu Bakr:

“We watched the police vehicles until they disappeared from our vision. A few people started to leave, as it seemed like the Struggler had already made his point. I wasn’t totally convinced. The letter had made it sound as if he would deliver justice on that hill, so I told the others to wait a little while longer. Some decided to leave anyway, but many chose to stay with me. We waited perhaps another forty minutes before somebody spotted a single police van speeding towards the hill. It was the smaller kind of lorry they use for carrying prisoners and riot police. It drove up from the base of the mountain before parking at an open area on the Western side of the hill, the side that faces away from the city of Cairo.”

A voice blared out over the van’s bullhorn, calling on the people who had gathered to come down.

Via Omar Anwar:

“We did as we were ordered and approached the vehicle. As we got closer, we saw that the fan was covered in small dents and burn marks, along with a few bullet holes. One of the tires had popped and the old van was sagging. Then, as a couple of young men approached, the driver’s door opened up.”

A man in black pants, a black shirt and a red and black kefeyiah over a black mask stepped out and faced the small crowd.

“He was a lot shorter than I imagined him to be,” Hussein Baky reflected years later. “The Struggler, I mean. He was strong though; his body filled out the black outfit he wore perfectly. He stared at us for a while as we looked back at him. I think he was searching for plainclothes officers in the crowd, or maybe he was just studying us, trying to evaluate if we were worthy of his attention, of this act of justice he wanted to convey. We must have been, because he crossed his arms and said, ‘You will tell everyone what you see. You will testify.’ Then he went to the back of the truck and opened the doors to the coach of the lorry.”

Bloodied and shabby looking, nine men chained together in a line by ankle shackles were dragged out of the back. At the front was the pudgy mustachioed form of Sufyan el Amr, followed by his sons Mohsen, Akbar and Adham. Next was police commander Shafiq Mahmud, his white dress uniform stained with patches of blood dripping down from his mouth. He was followed by the lanky Suhayl Ismail, who was then followed by the two state security agents who had carried out the interrogations of the men from Moqattam. An elderly man in a galibiya appeared last at the end of the chain. Hussein Baky recognized him as Gamal Lahabi, a repairman and electrician who had performed maintenance before at the police station.

The nine men were forced to their knees by the Struggler. Many were shaking uncontrollably.

“I looked at Sufyan El Amr’s eyes,” recounted Baky. “I had only seen pictures of him in newspapers before. I thought we looked very similar actually. You could tell he was scared out of his mind. Not one of them talked as the Struggler paced back and forth behind them.”

Eventually the man who had kept his promise stopped in the center of the line. He folded his arms and then he addressed the crowd.

“He said it was our duty to judge these men,” Abu Bakr recounted. “They had failed us and therefore we had to judge them. I can’t really tell you why we were so quiet at first. I think it had to do with his eyes; they were just so wide and bright and they just contrasted so much with his dark clothes. I don’t think I ever saw him blink as he looked at us. I almost thought he could see everything, even our thoughts. You couldn’t have escaped from him even if you’d wanted to. He knew what he had to do, and you couldn’t help but admire him for that.”

The crowd was silent as the Struggler unrolled a piece of paper from his pocket. He read off a short list of charges; cruelty, brutality, thievery, oppression of innocent believers, assaulting women, corrupting the minds of Egyptians, and failing in their duties to protect them. When he was done, he asked the crowd if they believed each of the men was guilty.

Via Omar Anwar:

“He started with Gamal Lahabi, standing behind him with his hand raised up. He said, ‘Do you find this man, Gamal Lahabi, guilty?’ We weren’t sure what exactly to do, so he asked again, saying that we should raise our hands if we thought he was guilty. One by one, we each raised our hands. We all knew the nine men he had brought, most of them anyway. We knew the crimes they had committed; we knew they were all guilty. So, as he went down the line asking us to decide the fate of those men, we all raised our hands high. Or most of us.”

The council, the crowd of fifty or so people, found each of the men guilty. A few of the accused, especially Mohsen Sufyan, tried to cry out several times. Each time they were kicked into silence by the Struggler. It was, according to those present, the same kind of defense they had allowed their victims.

With the judgment reached, the men −some of whom were now weeping− were pulled to their feet and led by the Struggler to the van. He ordered them inside and they obeyed without hesitating, even though he didn’t appear to have a firearm or a weapon of any kind.

When all the men had disappeared inside he shut the door to the lorry and returned to the driver’s cabin.

Abu Bakr described what happened next:

“He pulled out two large gas canisters and started covering the entire vehicle with fuel. He was moving quickly, as about fifteen minutes had passed since his arrival and we could hear sirens approaching. He then lit the car on fire with a lighter and walked back to us. He folded his arms and stood watching at the front of the crowd as the vehicle burned and the men inside started screaming for their lives.

“One of them, I don’t know who, kept saying, ‘In the name of God, save us; I swear to God we don’t deserve this!’ No one saved them; no one cried out or turned away, not even Fatimah and the other women. We were utterly drawn to those flames and we did nothing to put them out. We were like children watching water go down a drain. We were so fascinated by what we saw that we were unwilling to stop the water from disappearing, unable to stop the flames from burning until they dimmed and the screams of those men went quiet. Only as the fire died out did we realize the Struggler had disappeared and we followed soon after, missing the police by about ten minutes.

“From that point on I would always refer to the man I had met that day as the Struggler. I knew it was my cousin Anwar. I suspected as soon as I heard the first stories. It was confirmed the moment he spoke to us. Not everyone recognized his voice, I think, but I did. It was the voice I heard him speak with when he discovered Mohsen’s identity and the verdict against Sheikh Jibril.

“But you know, despite all of this, the man I saw with those wide eyes was not my cousin; he wasn’t Anwar my uncle’s son from Upper Egypt; he wasn’t just another shebab struggling to make ends meet; he really was the Struggler, and I was never prouder to find him at home that day looking more content and satisfied than he ever had before. He was smiling, and I understood and smiled back. In our whole lives, it was the first taste of justice we had ever had.”

The Judge Arrives

The attack which destroyed the Saif el Adel police station made headlines in many Egyptian Dailies in 1990. The destruction of an entire precinct and the deaths of fifteen officers including the station’s commander was a cataclysmic event for the state of Egypt. However, it was in one sense a large stone thrown into a lake just before the first terrible gust of a storm. Its ripples would in time fade away amongst the suddenly tumultuous waves of that decade. That storm was the previously mention rebellion of Gamaa Islamiyya against the Jahillyya government which arrived in 1992 just two years after the Saif al Adel was burned down.

It was this climate that allowed the destruction of the station to be woven into the fabric of terrorism and insecurity which dominated all of the 1990s. Many newspaper reporters, journalists and police officials placed the Struggler and his one man war against injustice into a category they already knew and understood. Even if he wasn’t a member of the militant cells he certainly shared their goals and their violent methods, he spoke using religious rhetoric and had used it to justify killing government officials.

He was therefore naturally categorized as a terrorist, which automatically meant assigning a member of State Security to capture him. The man they chose was Captain Mohamed Ansari, whose extensive cooperation granted me access to many of the more intimate details I’ve related in this story, including access to special witnesses such as one of Sufyan el Amr’s living sons who still lives under police protection.

Ansari, who’s hunt for the Struggler would span almost five years, was a veteran counterterrorism agent who had spent years tracking down the men connected to the assassination of Anwar Sadat. He was also a solid investigator with a talent for gaining the cooperation of reluctant witnesses and accomplices in crime without resorting to the Egyptian policemen’s standard tools of interrogation, the club and the car battery.

Ansari, as he related to me after retiring in 2004, was ambivalent toward the case when he started.

Via Mohamed Ansari

“I categorized him, the Struggler, into the Islamist terrorist category that I was used to working with. After all, catching the Ikwhen and the Jihadists was what I was best at. My nickname among my colleagues was ‘the barber’ because I shaved the beard off of the first terrorist I ever interrogated. It was humiliating enough that he confessed everything. I assumed this case would just be very standard.”

Assigned to bring in the Struggler in October of 1990, Ansari arrived at the ruins of the Saif el Adel police station which was under the swift protection of Central Security police.

“I was assigned three other agents to work with on site who had been working on the case previously. They were all professionals, though one was a little young for my tastes. We began by inspecting the damage that was done to the building while the agents filled me in on what officers who had survived the attack told them.”

The chronology of the attack on the Saif el Adel station, compiled by State Security at the time read as below:

Around 2:30am on September 21: 20 officers in two police lorries and one truck leave the police station for the Moqattam Hills to join their colleagues from other precincts, under the supervision of Captain Hamdeen Amgad.

Around 3:15am: The police truck carrying Capatin Amgad reports suffering engine trouble and pulls over for maintenance in Moqattam leaving the rest of the convoy to continue to the hill.

Around 4:30am: As the sun rises a sudden blast occurs inside the police armory at the station blowing out the rooms on the first floor and causing a fire in the police compound and on the second floor.

Also at around 4:30am: The police truck that pulled over for repairs appears outside the gate of the station compound and rams head on into the wall. Wired with explosives and cans of gasoline, the car blasts a hole in the wall damaging two lorries parked inside and sending a pillar of fire into the sky which is seen for kilometers. The remains of Captain Amgad and two other officers are found inside the remains of the car later.

Around 4:35am: Police officers Malek and Soliman, and State Security agents Ahmed and Bassem encounter a masked man in a red and black kefeyah while guarding the entrance to a special holding area on the second floor adjacent to station’s Commander Mahmud’s office. The assailant beats all four officers senseless. No officers inside the compound trying to extinguish the fire and search for survivors report spying the man.

Around 4:45am: Officers Mohamed, Ismail, and Mamduh, report seeing Commander Shafiq Mahmud and eight other men being loaded into the back of a police lorry at gunpoint by a masked man in a red and black kefeyah. The officers attempt to subdue the suspect. The officers fire on the suspect but are unable to prevent him from loading the captives into the lorry. As they attempt to reload, the suspect assaults the three officers and disables them. Other officers spot the commotion and try to assist before the masked man jumps into the lorry and drives it away through the blast hole in the wall. Other armed officers attempt to shoot the suspect and disable the vehicle but are unsuccessful. Several other officers are run over by the lorry as it escapes. There are no fatalities.

Around 6:00am: Officers find the burned remains of the stolen lorry and nine men inside its carriage. The men are Commander Shafiq Mahmud, State Security Agents Hassan Khattab and Hussein Ramy. Sufyan el Amr, Mohsen Sufyan, Akbar Sufyan, Adham Sufyan, Suhayl Ismail, and Gamal Lahabi.

In addition to the nine men who died on the hill in Moqattam six police officers were killed in the attack on the station including those in the truck. With no witnesses coming forward from Moqattam Captain Ansari’s men quickly advocated for random sweeps and detentions of people in the area. The counterterrorism veteran however preferred a different approach.

“When I visited the wreckage of the building I consulted the explosive experts who had analyzed the blast in the munitions room, they concluded it had been caused by a remote control operated bomb placed next to the munitions which happened to rest just next to the station’s gas lines. I knew then that someone with knowledge of the station had helped this Struggler plan out the attack.”
It didn’t take Captain Ansari long to find his chief suspect.

“I looked at the nine men who had been burned to death in the lorry on Moqattam and it was pretty obvious eight of them were directly connected to the Struggler. The Commander and the State Security agents had been behind the interrogations of the men from Moqattam he had tried to avenge, while Suhayl, his sons and Sufyan were all involved in the drug trade he was trying to crush. In truth, they all had a very obvious history together. They were also all supposed to be at the station the morning of the attack, with Commander Mahmud, the Suhayl family and Sufyan all living at the station under protection of State Security.

Then, though, there was Lahabi, a very simple electrician who by the accounts of the officers had not been seen inside the building before it was attacked and who had done a number of jobs inside the station before. We very quickly had our man and we quickly discovered he was far from a shameless person.”

Lahabi, as it turned out, was well known among the police and ordinary people for overcharging his services and outright stealing from his clients, except from the police whom he worked for next to nothing. He was also known to be addicted to heroin and had tried his hand at a number of petty crimes to try and get money. Police at the station knew of his past but tolerated it in light of his cheap reates and the fact as he often kissed up to the officers hoping for favors and a little extra bakhsheeh.

“As soon as we found out from the officers at the station that Lahabi had repaired some of the wiring inside the police armory five days before the attack, my men, my three agents, went to Lahabi’s home where his wife, I think she was relieved to be rid of her grimy and greedy husband, was more than happy to talk about his activities. She described how he had come into more money lately after being offered a job by some figure he would only identify as ‘Mohandis Miim ’.

They asked if she had seen anything related to this work. The only thing she thought might be relevant was a night when she had found him in their kitchen testing the signal and receiver for some device he wanted to switch on with a remote button. He had told her it was for a car door.”

Ansari’s colleagues also came back from Lahabi’s home with a list detailing the men he hired for certain jobs throughout the year and how much he owed them. The last man he had worked with, the man he had hired for the job in the armory, was someone by the name of Abu Bakr Baky.

                “I knew there was a very strong chance it was a false name,” Ansari said. “But at the same time I believed it was more than coincidence that the father’s name of one of the suspects who had been picked up by the police just before the attack had been named Baky and that this Baky had not only had past history with the police but had also suffered the trauma of having his daughter assaulted by one of the men who was burned.”

             Baky is an extremely rare name in Egypt, so much so that many Egyptians including myself do not know its meaning or origin.

           “Luckily one of the officers at the station could recall which home Mr. Baky had been taken from in Moqattam. I decided to pay a visit to the home myself, passing myself off as a newspaper reporter. Not surprisingly, Mr. Baky was reluctant to speak to me at first and it took several more attempts before he finally opened his door to me.”

         Having convinced Mr. Baky that he was a reporter for an American news agency covering the recent torture of men by the police and that he who would keep his identity secret, he proceeded to ask him questions about his detention.

          “I tried to make my questions to draw out his sentiments about the authorities. I knew he was too old and too pudgy to be the man people had been describing as the Struggler but I thought he might have something to do with the man behind the mask; again I was still thinking we were chasing a member of some Islamist group and when Mr. Baky admitted upfront to having been in the Brotherhood I was more and more certain I was on the right track.”

          Early in their ‘interview’ Mr. Hussein’s deaf daughter Fatimah served her father’s guest tea.

“I smiled at her in thanks as she put that small plastic tray in front of me in that cramped little room she shared with her whole family. She smiled back very shly. I remember how pale her face seemed. There was a real lack of color that was just overshadowed by the very bright orange headscarf with black stars she had wrapped around her head. She was small, and pretty but my eyes didn’t linger long on her as her father was right there. I worried I had lingered too long because as she left, he grabbed a hold of her and signed something to her I couldn’t understand; he seemed very upset. I was worried my glances had gotten the poor girl in trouble but Mr. Baky explained that he just wanted her to stay around the house that evening.

        By that time, I felt we had reached the point where I could ask him a bolder question.

       ‘Mr. Baky,’ I said. ‘Before I leave here can I ask you one more question.”

      ‘You are welcome.’

      ‘What do you think about the actions the man known as the Struggler took? Are they justified in your opinion?’

      Mr. Baky put down his tea, which he had consumed up to the bottom filled with tiny grains, and stared at me. I could tell he was trying to read me.

     ‘I swear to God,’ He said, rubbing his palms together and opening them up before me. ‘I wipe my hands clean of that whole affair.’

     ‘Does that mean you don’t agree with what he did?’

     I could sense he was becoming wary of me so I told him I was just trying to clarify his statement for my article.

    He leaned back a little and rubbed the calluses on his hands.

   ‘Sir, rest assured, whether that young man was right or wrong for what he did to those men I’m sure he will receive a just judgment as we all must.’

    “When he said that, I was sure I was chasing the right rabbit. I told my men to monitor his home as often as they could. They kept tabs on him for some months but they never reported anything very out of the ordinary apart from a few times he yelled at his daughter.”

      The surveillance of Mr. Baky continued for almost six months, well into the next year but with little results. Meanwhile, corrupt officers, government officials and petty criminals of various kinds across Moqattam and other areas of Cairo such as the City of the Dead and Imbabah began turning up beaten or dead. Usually the latter was reserved exclusively for anyone in a uniform or suit. Drug dealers, and common thieves tended to get off with just a beating, a standard punishment for those who snatch purses and wallets when they are caught in most Cairo neighborhoods.

      Captain Ansari requested more men to track down the Struggler, who seemed to have a talent for navigating around the police and their plainclothes counterparts with impunity. His request was refused, and pressure began to mount from his superiors to catch the vigilante.

Via Captain Ansari

      “Those above me always worried more about having arrests they could report to the interior ministry rather than whether or not those arrested were the right men. Taking my time was what defined my style of investigation. I still thought even after six months that something would come up with Mr. Baky.”

       One day in March of 1991, Captain Ansari decided to enter Moqattam himself and monitor the Baky home.

      “I dressed in some shabbier looking clothes and went into the area pretending that I was visiting a relative. No one bothered me so I must have disguised myself well. I took a spot at a corner ahwa and ordered some Nescafe. My men had been pushing me to just arrest Mr. Baky and torture him again but I had refused. Torture was only applicable in certain situations for me, and while it provides many confessions it didn’t always give you good information.

       Still, I knew we only had so much time left to produce results and I was desperate to catch the man behind the mask. A plainclothes officer in Imbabah had been beaten only two nights previously while trying to take a bribe from a fruit vendor; that had come after the death of Dr. Hany Habib, a leading state prosecutor who had put dozens of Islamists and Muslim Brothers behind bars, and two police conscripts who were guarding him. They had been thrown off the roof of the bludgeoned Dr’s building.

             So, I waited watching Mr. Baky’s door watching as the sun started moving across the sky. I had started to wonder if I could keep from arousing the suspicions of the people in the neighborhood if I stayed in the ahwa when the door to his home finally opened. It was Mr. Baky’s daughter who emerged, walking towards the direction of a market I had passed on my way into the street.

            She didn’t spy me as she passed and I began to wonder where she was going. Her father’s stern warning seemed not to have dissuaded her from going out. It would take more than a trip to the market to convince her to defy her father’s wish in such a way. I hesitated for a moment or two but decided to listen to my instincts and go after her.

              It was enough to track her bright headscarf through those dirty brick streets. I kept my distance though following her to a microbus station at the edge of Moqattam. She grabbed a bus and I managed to get a taxi just in time. The driver, himself a former policeman, didn’t hesitate to follow the bus when I showed him my ID card. She got off at a stop just in front of the Sultan Hassan Mosque I told the driver to park the car opposite her and wait a few minutes until she had disappeared from view. I gave him some money and got out on foot, discarding my jacket so I looked slightly different and followed after her. I managed to catch sight of her as she walked up sfsadfhjask street towards the citadel of Salahudin.

           It had been years since I had done any sort of undercover work, I kept worrying she would spot me but she never changed her course suddenly. I followed her from a distance of about twenty meters, just in front of castle’s outer walls, and watched as she went through the main gate, paying the visitors fee at the entrance. I paid the same fee and went in after her climbing up the outer wall so I could watch her from a distance.

          She went past the keep and the Turkish mosque to the overlook, the place where you can look down and see the rest of the cit; it’s a common place for young couples to meet anonymously outside of the prying eyes of their families and neighbors. I remember it was smoggy that day; she stood on the wall with her back face towards the clouds of car exhaust hovering over the minarets and the apartment blocks. I could barely make out the pyramids from where I stood a few meters away. I lit a cigarette and waited watching her until. By then the sun was getting low. I was worried they’d close the gates and force everyone out.

              But then, sure enough, a young man in a brown jacket appeared. They greeted each other very warmly. Their bodies never touched but it was obvious they were lovers or sweethearts. They smiled at one another and the young man took a seat on the wall above her. They signed with each other for several minutes. I couldn’t understand what they were discussing but then the young man pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to the girl. She read it for about a minute and then turned the page over. Only a moment after she did that, she abruptly jumped back and let the paper fall to the ground.

             The young man jumped down and picked up the paper again. He stuffed it away inside his jacket but before it disappeared I got a glimpse of a bright red blotch on the back of the sheet; the source of the young girl’s revulsion. It was then I knew there was more to what I was seeing than a romantic rendezvous. I couldn’t make an arrest, especially when I could have been trying to detain a wanted criminal who was already renowned for his fighting prowess.

I turned around and took my police radio out of my coat to call for backup

I had hidden the radio from view and lowered my head down to the receiver when a pair of boys abruptly stopped in front of me. Their gaze drew the attention of several other people who also stopped to watch me. Worried they would expose me I hissed at them to keep walking and spoke my request into the radio. When I turned, however, the couple was gone. Infuriated, I ran to where they had been standing and tried my hardest to spy them through the crowds of people. I searched up and down and all over but was unable to spy them.

       I cursed loudly and called for my brothers in the tourism police to close the gate so no one could escape. ‘There’s a wanted terrorist inside the citadel.’ I told them. They did as I requested, after ushering out all the Western tourists and we searched every wall, tower and chamber of the citadel, we even entered the mosque and the police museum but Fatmah and her mysterious partner had escaped. I couldn’t understand how they had done it until later at dusk after one of the conscripts found a rope tied to a pillar dangling to the ground. They had climbed down the southern tower and escaped into the streets.

      I thought the day was a waste of time. I was preparing another defense for my actions, when a Lieutenant spotted something just beneath the rope. He drew me over. There was the paper with the red blotch the man had tucked away inside his jacket pinned underneath a rock with a second strip of paper on top of it.

              The first sheet was addressed to me, or rather to the man who had been trailing the pair. It read:

To Those Who Pursue Me,

Know that others have been led to my path. We grow, and as we grow you shall shrink and step aside.

The Struggler. 

                

               The writing was very slurred and uneven but each word had been spelled correctly. It was clearly a poor hand that had written the note; a poor hand but attached to an educated and intelligent mind.

               The second letter was written in very ornate and beautiful calligraphy, the Kufic style as I later found out. The writing was not only beautiful it was perfect Fusah, so perfect I had to have a sheikh at Al Azhar translate parts of it for me. I eventually found out what it said in its entirety.

In the name of God the most Merciful and Compassionate

To My Rightly Guided Brother the Struggler,

From Your Most Loyal and Loving Student the Judge,

Your actions over this last year have resonated with me. I too have seen the rampant and filthy corruption in our country and like you long for it to be a safe place for all true believers. The apostates and the hypocrites however are everywhere, not just in the jail cells and behind the desks of the men who guard them.

We are the strugglers, but we are but slaves of God who fill out his commandments without question and obedience. To fight for the people we must save them from those who are hypocrites in all matters of religion. Submission, to God’s justice requires us to judge all actions and activities not just those of the rulers. The sins of the people are also an injustice, the greatest injustice in fact for they are an affront against God. Therefore our priority is to avenge God, before considering the needs of ordinary people. Making the world safe for believers also means making them safe from their own sinful desires.

I implore you therefore, to accept me as your brother in arms and to join you in your struggle to fulfill God’s will. To show you my genuine devotion, I have attached the finger of the hand I severed from a police officer in Imbabah trying to get a bribe from a fruit vendor. This punishment is in line with the Surah, and our noble tradition of Shariah, which I’m sure you are familiar with. If you wish to contact me you may use the phone number written on the finger.

The Judge