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Two months ago, shortly after Hector’s reinstatement into the CIA, Hector and Yubi had joined the Graduate Students Association at AIMES on a trip to Paris. They thought the trip would rekindle their romance.
But for a whole week, all they got was Kero’s embarrassing, loud, and unwanted company.
Who would believe this skin-and-bones malingerer was a celebrated author, a surgeon, and a Revolutionary hero!
Before Paris, Kero—a single male in his late twenties, a Copt in Islamic Egypt who dreamed about breaking out of dhimmitude ever since his eyes opened to the world—had been turned down by every Western flag in Cairo. No strong ties to home country, read all his visa rejection letters. The US Embassy had gone so far as to block him, having been, let’s say, too slow to budge after his last visa interview.
Kero had been the only AIMES student denied entry to the Embassy’s Halloween party last October. Not even Hector’s friendship with the ambassador could get him in.
Hector soon made it up to Kero, though.
“C’est un pauvre type, Votre Excellence,” Hector intimated to Philippe Lachance, the French consul, over the phone, “mais on lui donne le salaire d’un roi.” Hector outlined Kero’s privileges at AIMES: a four-thousand-pound monthly stipend, plus free lodging at AIMES’s hostel in Zamalek, plus a books allowance, plus free transportation. “It’s a good bargain for all sides,” Hector said. “The donor is a most generous man. He keeps the Institute solvent and the poor bright kids happy. Prince bin Hakam. You remember him from our weekend in Dahab? Yes, yes, Your Excellency. Right on. Big fellow, ponytailed, and he wore a striped swimsuit on the plage like Elvis in a reggae Jailhouse Rock of sorts. Ha ha ha. With a big difference, though. No, not that. The prince loves his women as much as he loves his yachts. But he doesn’t have to dance to get them. They dance for him.”
Without this call, and a formal letter Hector had the dean cosign—pledging responsibility if Kero scooted to his twenty cousins in Amsterdam or thirty uncles in Milan and, as with most Copts, filed for asylum—Kero would neither have seen nor fallen prey to the City of Light.
Think of a wretched monk after Lent—to repast finally on the ambrosia of God!
Of a virgin bride on her wedding night.
Of Bastille Day.
So he couldn’t handle it, the poor kid. He binge-drank, wasted all his euros in a single day (cadged through the rest), and bled his past in pathetic, masochistic spurts.
* * *
In the few weeks leading up to the Egyptian Revolution, Kero had been given Haram’s social media accounts to administer. A computer geek by hobby—a reprieve from medical practice, which he wasn’t so keen on—he did a pretty good job.
So good, in fact, that the State Security Police whisked him away for a second interrogation.
The first interrogation had been seven months earlier, in June 2010. During that time, Kero had been so despondent about leaving Egypt. A Coward by nature, he committed himself to a rather silly suicide plan. He sought to provoke the despotic government. Kero created a Facebook group called Egyptians Against Injustice. Nothing original. Better and more active groups had been around for months. But by dint of copying others alone, he was dragged from work to stand before a solemn State Security officer. The officer saw a penniless physician, a mumbling dwarf, and a Copt—someone with born antipathy to the government’s biggest nemesis, the Muslim Brotherhood—so he settled for a gentle reprimand. “Your country gave you a degree in medicine,” the officer said. “Use it. Don’t hang out with those glue-sniffers, those lefties. They’re no doctors or engineers or anyone useful. Look after your mother and sisters, who’ll be raped and cannibalized if the Ikhwan reaches power.”
Kero had been tagged as “low-risk” and let go.
Come December 2010, Kero’s play Pharaohstan was staged in Cairo, to huge success. And thanks to that, Kero got to meet the demigods of society. Actors. Musicians. Writers. Vloggers. Politicians. And finally the new angry prophet of the opposition’s Torah: Ibrahim Noman, a man with a thousand faces (lawyer, Sufi, secularist, aristocrat) who anointed Kero as the wizard who would mobilize the masses with his digital wand.
“Do you see these marks?” Kero would bare up his torso and hunch over the table, in Paris, physically misshapen like a doll that had fallen into a bonfire. On his scoliotic back and his flanks and buttocks, the flogging scars stretched.
So the State Security goons had hauled him off for a second interrogation, this time from his bed, at three a.m. They tried to pry a confession out of him. They tortured his soul. Waterboarding. Cockroaches. Flogging. Sleep deprivation. False promises. Sex. A pretty interrogatorice (Kero yowled the world) stripped down for him, excited his organ then danced a lighter underneath, made him evacuate his lust on the floor then slapped him and finally opened the door for a big man—who was tall with a bony face like Lurch in The Addams Family—to come and rape him. “But I bite,” Kero reassured the startled ladies. “Not even Iblis could get a piece of me. Ha ha ha.”
A week into this horror, the SSP invited his family over. Kero had two pretty sisters—Janette and Lydia, twenty-one and -two—both pharmacy students because Kero had forced them to avoid medicine. His mother—Madiha—was a widow with osteoarthritic knees who worked as a cleaning lady and had been waiting on Kero to open up his own clinic so she could retire.
Kero saw them all through a one-way mirror. The SSP officers were bored with his childish pigheadedness, they told him. They really wished he hadn’t pushed them so. “But we gave up on you. What do you expect? We have families, too. But what kind of doctor would leave his family in such poverty? Tut-tut. Bad Cuckoo. Bad Cuckoo.”
They knew how to break him. The reticent hero vomited hysterical babble: Haram’s codenames and phone numbers and social media accounts, their secret operations room, the blueprints for the planned riots, everything.
Then one sixtyish general genuflected beside him and crooned into his ear. “Listen, Cuckoo, listen.” A banshee screech echoed in the dark, horrific yet distinctly wordy. “See? We don’t need you anymore. You’re not just an infidel and a traitor, but stupid too.” The general’s voice was almost sensual. Kero lost his sense of reality. The general waggled his middle finger toward Kero’s family behind the one-way mirror. “You’ll never see your family ever again. Decent citizens like these do not deserve a piece of feces like you. Godspeed, my boy.”
They blindfolded him, choked him with a rotten eggplant, wrapped him up in a flour bag, and jammed him with many other bodies in a garbage truck.
When Kero came to, he saw a framed icon on a bright lemon-green wall.
Where am I?
You’re in Garbage City, brother. We saw the tattooed cross on your wrist so we knew you’re one of us. You’re in good Christian hands. Drink this holy water. Slowly. It’s a miracle you’re alive at all. Blessed be Saint Saman the Shoemaker!
“Garbage City, then.” Kero hiccupped in Paris. The place of his resurrection was a dunghill whose creation myth was biblical: a piecemeal relocation by a saintly shoemaker contracted by the pope to convert the Sultan. “Is it a wonder that I don’t believe in anything anymore? Cheers!”
On their third day in Paris, they had winded up in a Lost Generation shrine—Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots—Hector couldn’t recall which. What he recalled, though, was the picture of Picasso and Dora Maar on the wall: Picasso in a white tank top and Maar in a floral pleated dress she slyly hitched over her knees. Hector was so fed up with Kero’s emotional extortion, he sipped his white wine and did his best to space out.
Yet Yubi, all glistening eyes, her delectable chin cuddled in a half-rolled fist, her smooth elbow precariously propped on the table’s damask beside her Rully rouge glass, was wholly engaged. “You didn’t find them, Kero? Oh, I’m so sorry to bring it all back to you.”
“Dad did everything he could,” Fifi said, her dad the god of everything Revolution. “There simply is no record.”
“Everything was eaten by the flames,” Kero said.
“Of course,” Fifi said, “to hide their crimes.”
“No. I mean us,” Kero said. “We burned everything up.” Clap. Clap. “Khalas. Finito. No records.”
* * *
On Friday, January 28, 2011, clashes between the Egyptian protesters and the police had descended into chaos. Rocks flying. Gunfire amok. Teargas replacing air. And massive arrests, killings, and rapes (which were termed “virginity checks” by state-sponsored media).
The state media also accused the Muslim Brotherhood of this Armageddon. As for the “glue-sniffers,” those Haram deplorables, they were lost souls, zombies employed by Iblis and foreign powers, and the Muslim Brotherhood took them for an easy lay.
“Death to all traitors!” one zealous radio host proclaimed. “They will all be arrested and executed. Long live the Arab Republic of Egypt!”
“Oh, I remember that day,” Yubi said in Paris, tingly with the red wine, making a circle with a manicured finger on the damask. “Do you remember, baby?”
A nod from the disgruntled husband. How could he ever forget!
* * *
She has been insisting on seeing the protests for days, and he has reluctantly agreed.
Yubi is so excited, clapping her hands. She’s beginning to appreciate being married to a spy, she tells him, and she prints a kiss on his lips. She can’t wait to see the world through his eyes. She looks into his eyes and kisses him again. Isn’t that what he always wanted? For her to love him the way he is?
His strategy for her disguise is simple: Any woman will blend in easily in the Muslim world if, and only if, she succumbs to the hijab. So, contracting the wardrobe of her girlfriend Alyaa, Hector will offer his wife, for one day, to Allah.
Yubi checks herself in the mirror and snickers. She scampers around the bedroom like a schoolgirl in a new pinafore. Her veil is nothing garish, a blue chiffon, and Alyaa has coupled that with a full-sleeve, floor-length, carrot-speckled blue dress.
Enter the concerned father-to-be, and he tells the wife, “Wear these, honey.”
Ew... The despicable Coach sunglasses she thought she threw away a lifetime ago? The ones with the spotty violet? No, thank you.
“Your body is covered? Check. Your Asian eyes?” Hector shakes his head, hand outstretched with the sunglasses. “Uh-unh.”
Her jaw drops, eyes popping. “You’re racist. Do you know that?”
“I’m a Nazi if you don’t wear ’em. I’ll keep you safe or there is no going out.”
She snaps the accursed sunglasses. “Fine!”
Hector has got himself a pair of double-pleated black slacks, a checkered cotton shirt, and a bomber jacket, all for a song from Attaba, the low-buck market in central Cairo. Button by button, sock by sock, Yubi dresses him up. He’s aroused and wants to throw her in bed, but he looks at the wall clock and thinks of the dangerous streets outside.
They walk out of the Zamalek hostel hand in hand, destination Tahrir Square, a good three kilometers away. They blend smoothly into the zillion couples seeking the Revolution’s hub. Hector is glad they haven’t been found out. Not that it matters much. Blood has been shed already, and bleakness has been married to sobriety. No one would bother about two disguised foreigners wandering the angry streets wanting to get themselves killed.
Tahrir is so crowded Yubi nestles under his arm, and he squeezes her tight. Shouts. Placards. Bandaged faces. Bloodied beards. Is this the glorious Revolution?
The convivialities of previous days have dissipated, giving way to a choleric miasma. Yubi says, “It’s like a migraine aura.”
“You’re having one of those?” Her migraines have gotten worse during the pregnancy, since she’s stopped taking her pills. “Let’s get you back home.”
She tenses under his arm. “It’s not me you’re worried about. Are you?”
“Right,” he whispers into her veiled ear. “It’s my heir. Think how many socks I have to pass on.”
“Now I remember why I didn’t like you.” She disconnects herself. “You think you’re funny.”
They crawl on silently. They breathe the sulfur and soot in the air. Their eyes burn.
Once in a while, Hector comes across a face that makes him freeze.
This short fellow, with the mole on his left eyebrow, isn’t he the single from the Serbia trip?
And that chick over there, who’s climbed the lamppost and is waving the flag and squealing. She’s married to a human rights activist of a high status...
And that bandaged brunette. Isn’t she...?
God, I know these people. They’re my List of Eleven!
“What’re you looking at?” Yubi stiffens beside him.
He shakes his head and devotes his attention to the potbellied functionary, the jobless university grad, and the Nile Delta fellah.
He shows her his spying prowess. He lures Egyptians into dialog. No one suspects him, thanks to his native fluency. Hector has black hair, fair skin, and green eyes. Many Egyptians are mixed-race anyway. Lots have a streak of Turkish or European blood, especially among the aristocracy. They see the beauty of his face and assume he is rich—despite his shoddy clothes.
“And you, hajja,” Hector says to a widow who sells sugared simit, “what are you protesting?”
She? She’s mad about the stolen subsidies. Every time she goes to the Supply Bureau to receive her monthly rations of sugar and oil and flour, there isn’t much of any. “Where does it go, mister? Tell me, for the Prophet’s sake!”
Hector snickers. “Maybe the supply and demand don’t go hand in hand.”
But she shakes her scarfed head and swears to him it’s the Bureau’s infidels: They cook the books and sell the staples for double and triple the prices in the black market.
“And how about you, young man? Why are you so vexed?”
“You look like a decent man, so I’ll let in on a secret. You see those police officers in pressed uniforms who’re slaying us? I wanted to be one of them. I’m not ashamed of it, because my family is way under and we need social prestige to rise and see the world. But they rejected me at the Police Academy just because of that. Because I have no connections, you see. Now I’m going to bring it down on their heads and the heads of their families.”
By noon, the muezzins’ calls for the Zohr prayer interlace in a polyphony. The godfather of the revolt himself is seeking council with Allah in the nearby Omar Makram Mosque. All mosques are chock full and most people pray out in the open: They face themselves toward Mecca, follow the imam’s lead and recite al-Fatiha, bow and erect, then prostrate themselves, and soon rise again. The few Copts are holding hands, a picket fence around their Muslim brethren.
Once the prayer concludes, the Big No emerges from the mosque and comes to mount a high platform set in front of the vandalized KFC. He blares into his mic: “I have faith in our people’s will. We will triumph, and we will triumph, and we will triumph!”
Chants quake the square:
––––––––
People want
To bring down the Regime!
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Leave!
Leave!
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Down, down with Hosni Mubarak!
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And the occasional:
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Allah Akbar!
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A thud echoes. Everyone is flustered: What’s going on?
Screams. Bullets whiz past.
Yubi stumbles and falls on the ground. “Hector!” she cries.
Hector pulls her up, and they run in the stampede.
* * *
“We call it Friday of Rage,” Fifi said in Paris. She set down her Heineken bottle gently on the table and added, “I wish they really did that, you know. Like the radio guy said, arrest and kill them. Not Daddy or us, of course. I mean those Muslim Brotherhood animals.”
And threading her digits through her pressed hair—it was a passing phase of hers, and she had looked stunning!—the daughter of the most influential man of the century looked around her in fear.
The Muslim Brotherhood had eyes and ears everywhere. Even in Paris. Especially in Paris. For example, their classmate Zainab, the dean’s secretary who would be married to Mr Tough Guy, Ahmed al-Shatby, in less than a month.
Ahmed al-Shatby, this new and mysterious student at AIMES. This uppity who hung out with Westerners only. Who refused to sit with them in a café serving alcohol.
“Isn’t he like a gold merchant or something?” Fifi said. “What’s a gold-merchant doing studying anything? Oh, I know now. He’s not a gold-merchant. Uh-unh. He’s a gold-digger!”
“But they did arrest some Brotherhood leaders,” Hector deflected. “Didn’t they?”
Fifi took a moment to think, then said, “It was a bargain from the start. They couldn’t make a deal with Dad, so they made a deal with them. It was just a play. So cheap and ugly.”
Kero, legitimately hammered now, lost his grip on his fourth Stella bottle. The bottle smashed with a bang on the floor. Unfazed, or maybe encouraged by the attention, Kero shouted, “What’s the difference? The Muslims won anyway!”
Hector was livid. Yubi reached a hand to press his under the table.
A blonde waitress in a tux and a white apron came to dust off the mess on the floor. Kero asked for “un Stella encore, ma belle amie.” But Hector shook his head to the waitress.
“Where’d you learn your French?” Hector asked Kero.
“I learn very fast, doctor. My brain is like a nuclear engine.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. It’s my only asset.” Cockily, Kero winked at Fifi, then at Yubi, and when his eyes met Hector’s, he dropped his face and looked about to cry.
So he fell back on his soppy tragedy.
Once violence had been confirmed as the new reality of Egypt, he said, protesters chose to burn their country down. From the ashes Egypt will rise! The Egyptian Museum, police stations, the National Democratic Party, the Ministry of Interior, all were vandalized and torched.
Kero had been—he claimed—one of the daredevils who attacked the Interior Ministry’s HQ in Lazoghly Square.
“Do you know what—who—Lazoghly was, doctor? It’s a statue there. It was sculpted by a French artist called Jacquemart. The story is very literary. I have always wanted to write a story about it. So this man, Lazoghly, was a prime minister of Mohamed Ali Pasha. He was a very good person, maybe, because after so many years the Khedive Ismail remembered him and wanted to make a statue of him. The Khedive wanted to make Cairo like Paris, you know, very beautiful. But because of this ambition Egypt was drowned in debt and the British came. So anyway, Jacquemart the artist came and asked the Khedive, ‘Okay, where is this man I must make a statue for?’ And the Khedive was like, ‘No, monsieur, désolé. Mr Lazoghly died many years ago.’ So what can the artist do? He asked around and the people told him Lazoghly looked like this guy over there. ‘Who is this guy?’ He was... a water vendor, a saqqa. Ha ha ha. So funny, doctor, this statue we walk beside every day is a statue of a water vendor... Why are you not laughing, doctor?”
* * *
Yubi is bleeding. A bullet has brushed her right earlobe, missing her skull by a narrow half-inch. She will cover this ear forever, she sobs.
She tears off her veil and dumps it and stomps on it and she shrieks in Allah’s face.
She soon collapses into Hector’s arms.
The Beards stare at her, and at him. But the fray presently claims the Beards’ attention.
There is a life-or-death battle with the police forces afoot. So Hector carries his wife and takes shelter at the feet of an idol in the center of a nearby square.
One hand of this idol is clutching the hilt of a scimitar. The other is steeped, condemningly, toward the rioting masses. The idol’s bronze brow and oversized turban bolster the contempt in its eyes.
From the idol’s pedestal and over to the besieged ministries of Justice and Interior, water-cannons battle the suicidal protesters.
Shrieks echo from the deeps of hell.
Teargas hovers over the corpses like the mist over the Styx.
The sky is red. God is angry. And Yubi is crying.
* * *
So much for romance in Paris. Thank you, Kero!