7

So the chick managed to break out once he had broken the eggshell with his beak. He stuck out his bare head and his blind eyes, then smashed the egg completely, ruffled his short, scrawny feathers, and teetered along the surface of the earth like a black, ill-intentioned nightmare. He opened his eyes and jabbed his pointed beak in every direction, searching for the taste of flesh and following the smell of blood.

During the hour, which seemed to last an age, between the moment when Abdel Aziz and I were arrested and the moment we were thrown into the cell in Abdin police station, Abdel Aziz managed to bribe the policeman to let him make a quick phone call. He called his family’s big-shot lawyer. Some of us managed to do likewise, but others, like me, didn’t know anyone they could contact.

The big-shot lawyer sent a young man who worked under him—a joker with a glib tongue who had acquaintances in almost every police station. I didn’t see him myself, but that’s what I gathered from a policeman who told me later what had happened. He said the young lawyer arrived an hour after we were put in the cell, and they took from all of us our phones, identity cards, money, and everything in our pockets. Suddenly this joker made a scene in the whole police station, which led some of the officers to call Hassan Fawwaz, the head of the vice squad, who only a few hours earlier had supervised the process of rounding us up from various locations. They called him because it was his case and the people in Abdin had nothing to do with it and the whole story was a mystery to them and they didn’t know how to respond to this parrot, who kept repeating to them the names of people from the Qadi family, Abdel Aziz’s family, who held positions in all the important branches of government. Some of these people often appeared in the media, and with a single word they could advance those who were lucky or reduce the unlucky to the lowest depths. The lawyer deftly managed to slip in some threats, in such a way that an astute listener wouldn’t miss them.

Hassan Fawwaz arrived and countered the lawyer’s shouting with even louder shouting, along with curses and insults. Despite the rowdy exchanges, Abdel Aziz was summoned and they had a few words with him. Hassan Fawwaz remembered that the informer, Hayatim, hadn’t recognized Abdel Aziz and had rounded him up solely on suspicion. He backed down a little, especially when he heard the names of some of his relatives. They didn’t argue long, and so far Abdel Aziz hadn’t been formally detained. No police report had been written and no grounds for detention had been cited. They didn’t need any fuss or headaches over detaining someone from such a family, and their scheme was still in its early stages. Emboldened, Abdel Aziz asked Hassan Fawwaz to set me free too, but Fawwaz refused outright and shouted at the top of his voice that he would cut his arm off if I wasn’t a “certified queer,” and that if he gave way in every case of special pleading he would have to release all the gays he had spent days rounding up off the streets. The policeman almost died laughing when he told me all this.

Hassan Fawwaz did try to sound reassuring, however, claiming that it was all just a survey he was carrying out on the phenomenon of sexual perversion, which was alien to our society and definitely a recent intrusion from abroad. He wanted to start his survey by finding out roughly how many gays there were in Cairo, and whether they were passive or active or played both roles—just a sociological survey, no more and no less. He wanted to collect statistics and information, and the most important outcome might be to persuade the state to tackle this terrible plague that was spreading among us, so it would only be a matter of hours before we were all back home safe and sound. In my case, these few hours stretched into about seven months, from the heat of May to the cold of November, when some of us were pardoned. And some of us are still serving terms in prison as I write these lines.

Abdel Aziz came back to the holding cell with a policeman to say a few words to me. I moved toward the door with impatient joy, certain that relief was at hand, but as soon as I saw the expression on his face I knew he would go and leave me behind. He took my hands and pressed them between his large hands as he looked into my eyes. All the other detainees watched us attentively and in silence. In a whisper, he promised he wouldn’t leave me or abandon me, and he would leave no stone unturned to make sure I escaped from this ordeal as soon as possible. I was happy because at least one of us had saved his skin, in order to help the other and take an interest in his affairs. I suddenly found myself playing the role of the calm, courageous one, and I told him to get in touch with Shireen and make up a lie about how I had had to travel out of Cairo and turn off my cell phone, or that I was with Prince in the hotel to calm my nerves away from home—anything to explain my absence for two or three days. Then I took his pack of Marlboros, though I didn’t much care for that brand.

I didn’t cry. I was in a state of shock and was focusing on small, practical matters, as if I were going on vacation or going into hospital to have a minor operation. The tears came later—hot, flowing freely and with abandon. I went back to the cell after my friend left and tried to answer a deluge of questions from those detained with me, though I didn’t have any satisfactory answers. The contents of the pack of Marlboros were soon shared out between us. Then I fell asleep for some minutes and was visited by that complicated dream in which I come back to my apartment and find Shireen, my aunt Husniya, and Abdel Aziz apologizing for leaving me in the lurch.

Others apart from Abdel Aziz escaped the trap when the case was still in its early stages, and all the non-Egyptians—Arabs and non-Arabs—were released. I know there were more than ten of those. Some of the Westerners refused to go without their Egyptian companions and insisted until they managed to rescue their friends.

The police picked up dozens of men during the campaign, which lasted for several days in early May. The climax came in the early hours of May 11, 2001, two or three days after Abdel Aziz and I were arrested near Tahrir Square. The vice squad raided a large Nile boat, or floating nightclub, that was said to let gay men hold parties there every Thursday. It was called the Queen Boat, or Queen Nariman’s boat, and the case became known in all the media as the Queen Boat affair. The media were careful to repeat the word “raided,” which I just used unconsciously myself, although in fact the police did not raid anything. They just stood in the darkness on the riverbank and waited to pick off men who were leaving. They loaded them into trucks and, when the trucks were full, drove them to several police stations to empty the detainees into the cells, and then went back to pick up more as the night progressed. Apart from the ones on the Queen Boat, they picked up about twenty people from various public places—streets and squares. They even went so far as to arrest people from their homes and places of work, with the help of informers such as Hayatim. It was my fate to be among the twenty picked up in the street, after Hayatim noticed me by chance while he was driving around in the police van with the head of the vice squad.

That young voluble lawyer might have sensed that a major operation was underway, so he didn’t press too hard to get me out with Abdel Aziz, or maybe it was because he had accomplished his basic mission when he plucked his clients’ son from the lion’s mouth. Maybe he advised Abdel Aziz to leave his friend to his fate. Wasn’t his mother a famous actress? He must have important acquaintances who would get him out of trouble unscathed. “Didn’t you call his wife and reassure her?” the lawyer probably said. “You also called that Prince guy, whom he sees as a father figure. There’s nothing more we can do, believe me. Even visiting him in the police station could land you in big trouble.” In the police station I heard some strange talk suggesting that for some reason the case was of interest to circles at the highest level. Don’t ask me how or why, because even the devil himself couldn’t imagine what those people were cooking up.

He must have said something like that, and Abdel Aziz was persuaded or was worried about his reputation and his future. A few weeks after the start of the case he left the country to work in the United Arab Emirates, all of a sudden and with a proper work contract. He stayed out of the country until the furor died down and those around him forgot that he had been friends with someone accused of debauchery and contempt for religion in the case which attracted massive publicity.

Abdel Aziz went home that night and left me there, dreaming of the fairy-tale prince who would come back to save me on his winged white horse. My hopes faded little by little and an invisible fist tightened its stranglehold on my neck with every day that passed.