18

Karim saadoun was the person standing next to me in the hallway at the police station when the policemen came with the handcuffs. He was the first person I was handcuffed to. The first time handcuffs close on your wrists, it comes as a surprise, and despite the distress and the sense of constraint there is also a sense of relief and resignation. You feel as if you no longer have to think or make any decisions for yourself. Suddenly you go back to being a child, holding your father’s or mother’s hand, submissive to them, except that at that moment the state was the father, the mother, the guardian, and the omniscient god.

I caught sight of Prince outside the police station as they herded us toward the police truck. In my excitement I raised my free arm, waved, and called out to him. He hurried toward me, jostling past some of the people who had heard that their relatives or friends had been jailed. Just seeing him restored some of my peace of mind, after the days in Abdin and Azbakiya police stations, which had stretched out like a whole other life. When I saw him I felt confident that my old world was not a delusion, that it still existed and continued uninterrupted, and I mistakenly believed that I was only a hair’s breadth away from being set free.

I deluged him with questions and he answered me quickly, having noticed the impatient tone in which I was speaking. I was out of breath and he was looking with dismay at the spots of blood on my undershirt, my pale face, and some slight bruising on my shoulders. He told me that Abdel Aziz had called him to tell him I’d been arrested and was being held at Abdin police station for some unknown reason. Then he had disappeared and turned his phone off. Prince had called my wife to reassure her, claiming I had suddenly gone to Alexandria and had turned my phone off. He evaded her questions and he didn’t feel she had believed him. As I was at the door of the truck, he handed me a bag with food, water, cigarettes, and packs of tissues. With tears in his eyes, he said, “Don’t worry, Hani. You’re not alone.”

I tried not to believe him, but I did believe the tears in his eyes. As they piled us on top of each other in the back of the truck, I thought to myself that it wasn’t Abdel Aziz who had finally come out of his hiding place and dared to admit his true feelings. It was Prince, who had spent his whole life looking after us. God seemed to have breathed into him the spirit of a kindly mother, and if he abandoned me, the government’s handcuffs that I had on might then seem less cruel toward me than most people.

“Is that your father?” asked Karim.

“My friend,” I said, short of breath and suppressing my sobs. “Like a father to me.”

“Okay, please don’t cry, for my sake,” he whispered slowly.

As we pulled away from the Ramses area, the other detainees in the truck behaved like grief-stricken mourners at a funeral. They realized that the case against us was not going to be dismissed lightly. It was going to be a genuine sexual offenses case, with documents, prosecutors, medical examiners, and whatever was needed. They broke into weeping and sobbing because some of them had seen their families and were ashamed to be seen, or maybe it was just seeing the light of day and getting away from the stuffy cell, where we hadn’t been able to tell night from day for the past few days. We had with us an emaciated man as tall as a beanpole, with a large bald head. They called him Said the Skull. He moved slowly, leaning his long neck forward and always dragging behind him the man who was handcuffed to him. After a while along the way, Said looked out of a small hole in the truck, and then gazed around at our faces with his hollow eyes. “It looks like they’re going to take us straight to the detention camp,” he announced in his husky voice. He seemed to enjoy frightening and tormenting us.

Everything seemed to have been prepared in expectation of our arrival. The only thing missing was our physical presence in front of the prosecutors, to stitch up the case against us in their documents with the black eagle letterhead. The prosecutor who ordered us detained, initially for questioning, did not notice the bloodstains on our clothes. He wasn’t interested in the beatings we had endured or the injuries that were visible on all of us. When some of us asked him to record that we had been beaten and abused and that our confessions in Azbakiya police station were given under duress and torture, he behaved as if he couldn’t see or hear. My consternation at what was happening was comical compared with the calm acceptance by some of the detainees. At first I never ceased to be amazed by people such as Said the Skull or Mohamed Sukkar, Karim’s friend who was arrested with him when they came off the Queen Boat. They handled the disaster with resignation, as though it were an act of God, maybe because some of them had nothing to lose anyway. They lived precariously all the time, as was evident from the face of Mohamed Sukkar: his cheeks had two long scars left by a sharp razor, or maybe two razors working together simultaneously, held by a man who was expert at disfiguring faces.

On one of the occasions when we were handcuffed together, during one of our many journeys to or from the prosecutor’s office, he told me how he had appeared before Hassan Fawwaz several months before the rest of us, in the winter of the same year, when Fawwaz had arrested him and some other men and had fun with them for a few days, then turned them over to the prosecutor, who set them free.

“They poured icy water on us in the middle of winter to stop us getting a wink of sleep night or day, and in the end they brought in a bunch of kids high on drugs and let them loose on us. They told them, ‘Those fags are all yours.’ One of those kids had sex with me against my will. He didn’t want to. It was just so that they would send him home. He took out his anger on me and kept pounding me like an idiot, and however much I screamed or begged for help it was no use. In the end I lost consciousness, and they left me till I came round again.”

He and others told me stories whenever I sat next to one of them or when we were handcuffed together, maybe because I didn’t speak much because of my breathing problems, and they imagined I was willing to listen, or maybe because they wanted to win my sympathy and persuade me to help them in some way, or maybe each of us was trying to say his piece to anyone he found nearby at the time. Karim was different. He only spoke when necessary, and he only told stories if you asked him to do so inside the main cell, but only Karim’s stories helped to keep me going. He seemed to read what was written on my face throughout our detention. He saw that I needed soothing. He felt my pain with an intuition untainted by anything around us. With time I felt that this young man was related to me by blood, like my son or my brother.

Something in Karim’s face caught your attention at first sight—a secret something that meant you could never get your fill of looking at him. At first you thought that if you looked at his features long enough you would find the answer to your question and the mystery would be solved. But as you kept looking, the question remained unanswered. His face was almost completely round, with a clear, pale complexion and dimples in his cheeks, which were like sunken points when he was silent. When he smiled, laughed, or spoke, the dimples were even more obvious, like tattooed marks on each cheek. His hair was jet black and thick, neither soft nor coarse, and his eyebrows were bushy, joined by a thin line of hair over the top of his nose, which made him look even stranger. He had rather full lips that always seemed to be pouting, as if he were about to kiss something, or upset, or giving a sign that he knew nothing about some question. As if to say: “How would I know? I’m handsome and that’s enough.” Sometimes, between bouts of breathlessness and weeping, I would look at him admiringly, but without desire. Prison had killed off all desire, but not my unease when face to face with the mystery of beauty.

Over the coming months in detention, I went to sleep to the sound of his endless stories, and when I woke up I found him next to my bed, alert. “You slept well, thank God,” he would say. “Shall I make you a sandwich?”

Then I knew that God existed and still loved me and was taking care of me.

In the interrogations, we were surprised by the questions we were asked. They were questions that had almost nothing to do with the reasons why they had rounded us up. They asked some of us if we were members of a group called God’s Proxy on Earth, or what we knew about “the Kurdish lad.” Had we attended religious meetings on the roof of the house of the principal defendant, Samir Barakat? Had we attended same-sex weddings as part of the group’s rituals? It was clear that the charge went beyond merely having illicit sex regularly, and included blasphemy and forming a secret religious group. We concluded they had decided to lock us away at any price and remembered the case of the Satanists a few years earlier. Some newspapers announced simply: “More than fifty members of a Satanist group arrested: engaged in perversions and took pornographic pictures.” They also said they were “arrested while engaged in indecent acts, naked in the main hall on the Queen Boat, at a party celebrating the wedding of two young men, God forbid.”

I read all this after I came out of prison, among the cuttings that Prince had collected with help from some of the lawyers. He proved he was not just an old man who was trying to be young and who seduced young men with his money, connections, and charisma. He could have gone into seclusion and lain low to protect his reputation and fend off the accusations, of which there was no shortage, but that wasn’t his style. He was a stubborn fighter, even as he approached the age of seventy. He jumped into action in every possible direction, meeting lawyers and human rights workers, Egyptian and foreign, and working together with our friend Wagdi, the theater director, one of whose best friends had been arrested on the Queen Boat. If Wagdi hadn’t been too ill to go out with him that evening, he would have been among those arrested too. Wagdi started sending out statements like a maniac to anyone he hoped might help, until some international human rights organizations took notice and started to follow the case, with condemnations and publicity, but this happened when it was already too late. The documents had been prepared and they had tightened the noose around us.

The whole motive for the case might have been to take revenge on Samir Barakat, or more precisely on his family, and to tarnish their reputation by association with him, all because of a disagreement with another important family. They had raided Samir Barakat’s house about a month before they began their drama with us. They impounded all his files, pictures, and books, then summoned him to collect his belongings, and he hadn’t seen daylight since. Before his arrest he had been under surveillance for weeks. Then they interrogated him blindfolded for two weeks, under the most appalling psychological conditions. God alone knows whether Samir, who was pampered and well brought up, broke down like me under the pressure, the humiliation, and the physical torture and confirmed whatever they wanted him to confirm, or whether he really did have strange religious delusions.

They claimed he had suddenly told them, without any obvious context, about having a dream or a vision, as the official papers put it, about fifteen years earlier. He still remembered the dream, in which he saw the Prophet Muhammad receiving a visit from a young fair-skinned lad, and the Prophet said that this Kurdish lad would appear on earth and exact revenge on the whole world—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—simply because they hadn’t tried to stop the Turks attacking the Kurds. What did the Turks and the Kurds have to do with us? It might have been Samir’s fantasy after a heavy dinner or it might have been the brainchild of an unknown writer in the state bureaucracy, who suddenly gave free rein to his suppressed literary talents and started to compose dozens of pages about the God’s Proxy on Earth movement. Anyway, that ridiculous dream would be at the core of the case that would shake Egypt, annoy the world, and destroy the lives of some of us.

At first I didn’t understand anything and didn’t know how to answer when I was asked about the Kurdish lad and the God’s Proxy organization. I was indeed in another world. I was stammering so much and having such trouble breathing that I couldn’t put together a whole sentence that made sense, and I was willing to sign anything they wrote as long as they would let me go back to the cell to have a rest. Other people admitted they had homosexual tendencies in response to questions about whether they had made planes or missiles, and these were people who couldn’t read or write in the first place. In effect, they wanted to say, “We’re just gay, so take pity on us and don’t make us out to be terrorists.”

Now I like to imagine that talented civil servant who sat down and let his imagination run riot as he looked down at a blank piece of paper and then, like a novelist of genius, wrote the twenty-nine-page booklet, several copies of which they claimed to have found in Samir Barakat’s house. He gave his book the title God’s Proxy on Earth: The Religion of Lot’s People and of Our Prophet and Guide Abu Nuwas. I hadn’t known that Abu Nuwas was one of the “luvvies.” I later read some research papers and other documents that included references to this bizarre literary work. I remember the titles of some chapters: “Our World,” “Why Lot’s People?” “Our Religious Law in Summary,” “Gay Hymns,” “Commandments and Prohibitions.” The booklet included words of advice, such as “Satisfy your partner so that he won’t leave you.” Now I can smile or laugh when I read such words, as I see the nightmare from afar, as if it were a horror movie, relieved that I’ve left the darkness of the cinema and the grip of fear and entered the light of the street and the familiarity of ordinary life.

One of the police reports said Samir Barakat confessed that he had set up something called “The Proxy of God, the Lord of Hosts,” and one of his colleagues at work, a man called Mustafa, had built a prayer room for this organization on the roof of Samir’s building. They arrested this Mustafa and impounded 893 of Samir’s photographs that showed him in indecent poses with men and boys. In the investigations no pictures of naked men or men having sex appeared, and one of the things that Samir’s family told the representatives of human rights groups was that he was an amateur photographer whose work had appeared in several galleries, and that he was religious and had been to Mecca on pilgrimage.

I had seen this Mustafa shouting at Samir in the hallway in the court building. “You’ve ruined me, along with yourself. May God take revenge on you!” he said.

“I’m in the same situation as you!” Samir shouted back tearfully from afar. “Don’t wish me ill. That’s unfair.”

A few weeks later I heard Samir Barakat shouting in the courtroom in front of the journalists: “We’re victims, the victims of a grudge match between two big families.”

At that moment I remembered the story of King Solomon and the ant in the Quran. Amid the sweaty bodies of the men in white clothes packed into the defendants’ cage in the courtroom, their faces covered with handkerchiefs or white undershirts, with slits cut for the eyes, I tried to remember the whole verse. I crawled between their feet until I reached Karim, who was busy reciting in a whisper from a small Quran he was holding. “Do you remember the Ant chapter?” I asked him in a trembling voice. “Do you remember the verse where Solomon laughs at what the ant says?”

Karim nodded behind the handkerchief hanging down over his face and then, in his sweet voice, whispered the verse into my ear: “And then, when they reached the Valley of the Ants, one of the ants said, ‘Ants, go into your homes in case Solomon and his troops crush you unawares.’ And Solomon smiled in amusement at what the ant said, and said, ‘Oh Lord, inspire me to be grateful for the blessings You have bestowed on me and on my parents, and to do good works that please You, and include me by Your grace among Your righteous servants.’”