30

It was the first time in my life I had seen it raining in May. This was after they moved us to Tora Agricultural Prison. We had appeared before the prosecutors, who decided to extend our detention pending further investigations.

On arrival they made us stand in the yard in two lines, and it was then that it suddenly rained for a few minutes, despite the May heat. I still haven’t seen any explanation. I remember that Karim Saadoun looked up furtively to catch some of the big warm raindrops. Some of them slid down the lines in his weary face. The hint of a pained smile had hardly flickered on his lips when a massive slap landed on the back of his neck, accompanied by a large dose of insults. It was the end of the day and, although they didn’t spare us the obligatory ministrations with their tongues, fists, and boots, they didn’t seem to have the time or the energy to give us a proper reception, so they postponed that till daybreak. They soon stuffed us all, more than fifty men, into a room that hardly had space for twenty. There was no light and nothing to cover a floor that was splattered with dried shit. I fell asleep anyway from exhaustion and woke up to something crawling on my neck. I sprang to attention and grabbed the large spider in my hands. I wanted to talk to it, to ask it why it and all its kin had been singling me out for pursuit rather than everyone else, ever since I was a child. A single spider seemed to have been weaving the thread of my life since I was born, and would leave me only when I died.

In the morning the guards took us out and ordered us to strip down to our underwear. They stopped in front of one man who looked unusually effeminate and ordered him to take off all his clothes, possibly to make sure they didn’t have a real female as a guest in their cells. When he covered his shriveled little penis with his hands, they hit him and told him to take his hands away. When they saw it they had a good laugh at it. Then they handed us over to the prison barber, who looked rather like the handsome actor Abdel Salam Mohamed, famous for playing the jester in a play by Yousef Idris. Abdel Salam had visited my mother at the Shamm al-Nisim spring festival a few months before he died and had eaten the traditional salted mullet, kippers, and onions. Pleasant and affable, he never stopped laughing and joking. But our barber was nothing like that. He had a hideous, venomous, jaundiced face and kept insulting us and hitting us on the head with his clippers. “I’ll have to burn all my gear,” he said every now and then. “No doubt you all have AIDS and you’ll infect all the innocent prisoners.”

Then the orgy of beatings began, at the hands of other prisoners who had been ordered to attack us. I don’t know how long it lasted but when it was over and I was quite sure I no longer had to protect my head with my hands and curl up in a ball on the ground, almost completely naked, I felt like the happiest person in existence simply because it had stopped. The pain felt normal and tolerable now that the assault was over.

We had to be sorted out somehow, in case we resumed our debauchery on government premises. They divided us into two cells, one for the married men and one for the others, on the premise that this was the only reliable way to separate the passive homosexuals from the active. They were uncertain how to deal with an unmarried man who had the physique of a champion bodybuilder and was called either Wissam or Bassam, I no longer remember. His appearance didn’t suggest any sexual deviance, so the officer simply decided to put him in a room by himself, isolated from all the others, until his status could be determined. For the next three days this young man was held alone in a tiny room for twenty-four hours a day, until he almost went crazy and screamed at them to put him with the others, either with the bachelors or the married men. I acted quickly and tried to persuade a sergeant in whom I detected a trace of kindness to put the muscleman with the married men and put me with the bachelors. After a short discussion he agreed. All I wanted was to be in the same cell as Karim. As soon as Karim saw me coming into the cell, he stood up and greeted me at the door like someone greeting a long-lost brother. I rested my head on his shoulder and cried, and he patted my back with affection. We ignored the silly comments from here and there in the room about us and the film Love in the Prison Cell.

We spent a whole month trapped in that cell and if it hadn’t been for the lavish amounts of money that Prince dispersed, I would have starved to death before I died of shame, claustrophobia, or dark thoughts. They opened the cell door only once or twice a day, to give us our rations and the food that some of us had been sent. The guards had dug their fingers into the bowls of rice, the inside of the loaves of bread, the packets of cheese, and all the other dishes we received, to check for drugs, sharp instruments, or SIM cards for cell phones. But despite the searches some pills did slip through—whether with the guards’ connivance or behind their backs I don’t know—and some of the warders would secretly pass on to me a few five- or ten-pound notes to help me out with necessities, thanks to Prince, of course.

There was water in the bathroom for only one hour a day, between five and six o’clock in the afternoon, so every day arguments would break out at that time over who could go in to wash his clothes and his bowl and cutlery. A senior prisoner would settle any arguments that arose, usually based on his personal preferences. Karim, Mohamed Sukkar, and I learned to give way, doing the impossible not to provoke anyone. We filled our bottles one way or another during that one-hour period, however much we were abused or harassed, but for the rest of the day we were not immune from attempts to seize our bottles. Later, when the other prisoners realized that I was ill and that someone in authority had given orders that no one should stand in my way, they started treating me with more circumspection, maybe even pampering me a little and trying to please me.

They gave out one blanket per person and when we went to sleep we used our shoes as pillows. We covered ourselves with half of the blanket and laid the other half on the floor to ward off the dampness of the concrete, which we could feel in our bones at night. There were no visits, no letters, no contact of any kind with the outside world, and for several weeks, I don’t know how long, the only air we were allowed to breathe was the putrid air in the cell. After that, for just two hours a day, one hour in the morning and one hour at the end of the day, they let us out, not into the open air of the courtyard but only into the corridors between the cells. I remember how happy I was with every minute of those breaks, as I took in breath after breath of pure air, leaning against the wall and hardly moving my body.

The various cells at Tora Prison contained some bright stars in the worlds of crime, terrorism, and opposition to the regime. President Sadat’s assassins were serving their life sentences there and there were plenty of people from the Muslim Brotherhood, including their leader at that time, as well as extremists, Egyptians, and foreigners, who belonged to various organizations, such as al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups I had only heard about on television. I saw many of them after they allowed us out every day. I saw men with long beards coming together to exercise, and I also saw how discussion groups were formed between their various schools of thought and between them and the liberals and the leftists, who were fewer in number. Besides all those, there were Christians who had converted to Islam, and Muslims who had converted to Christianity, and others who had been detained for countless other reasons. We were all colors of the rainbow, an extraordinary mix brought together by just one thing—the fact that our masters were angry with us, whether that anger was justified and had legitimate motives, or simply because they didn’t like the look of us.

In the midst of all this, Karim was the only window that God gave me through which I could look out at something different, something that offset and subverted all the ugliness. Looking furtively at Karim’s face became one of my habits in prison. His voice was like a radio station in my head that consoled and reassured me. I no longer cared whether his extraordinary stories were events that had really happened to him or were as fantastical as the vision of the blond Kurdish lad who would defeat all religions in order to advance the cause of Lot’s people in the end times.

Karim started telling these stories only when I asked him, one dark night that I remember well. It was after an argument that I unintentionally provoked in the cell. The initial disagreement arose when two men who traded in prescription drugs competed over who would sell me what I needed. It was clear to everyone that I depended on the pills to breathe easily and go to sleep. After I and the guard on duty agreed that he would supply me with them, another man approached my mattress with a large bottle of water he wanted to sell me as a decoy, while secretly slipping me two Apetryl pills as a gift to win my business. I don’t know how word of this reached the guard, but a fight broke out in the cramped space, with followers of the two men scrapping with each other for some time before calming down to patch up their injuries and get their breath back. That night Said the Skull had taken a massive quantity of pills and in the middle of the fighting and the chaos, he just stood up, and went to a plastic bag hanging on a nail above my bed, which contained some loaves of white bread, cheese, olives, tins of tuna, and a few vegetables—my food that one of the guards brought from time to time and that I shared with Karim and Mohamed Sukkar, because none of their friends or relatives had yet asked after them.

Said took the bag despite Mohamed Sukkar shouting at him and our disapproving looks. Then Karim stood up and tried to stop Said, whereupon Said gave Karim’s beautiful face a slap that echoed across the cell. “Didn’t we tell you to turn the television down a little, you bastards? I can’t sleep because of you,” Said told him.

Of course there wasn’t a television in the cell and Said was imagining himself at home with his younger brothers, or that’s what some people guessed from what he said before and after the argument. Karim stared at him with tearful, stunned eyes, then came back cowed to his bed by my side. As the whole cell laughed in derision, the guard on duty sent someone over to hit Said the Skull on the head repeatedly with his fist in the hope of bringing him to his senses. He took the bag of food from him and gave it back to us. Said did come to his senses for some moments but he quickly relapsed. “You come and hit me in my own home as well?” he said.

Everyone laughed again, and they laughed even more a little later when Said called out to his sister Huda and told her to prepare a bite for him and his guests to eat. Even Karim laughed, wiped a couple of tears away, and asked me for permission to make Said a sandwich. Yes, I saw Karim Saadoun splitting a baguette open with his fingers, putting cheese and pieces of tomato inside, then standing up, walking over to Said’s mattress, and giving him the sandwich. Said, off in his own little world and moved by his little sister’s kindness, said, “Very kind of you, Huda. I’ll find you a husband, God willing.”

The roars of laughter and wisecracks filled the cell from floor to ceiling for quite a while. That same night I was so tired that the pills I had started taking to excess had no effect. When Karim hadn’t said anything for ages, I asked him to talk, to tell me about his life or anything else so that I could escape my dark thoughts and go to sleep. From that night on his whispered stories continued, until we emerged from the depths of that grave about seven months later.

That night, lying on his back, his gaze fixed on the ceiling as if he could see something there that no one else could see, Karim said, “Once upon a time there was a boy called Karim, who lived in a small town south of Tanta called Khorset. It’s an old Pharaonic name, meaning the place where Set, the god of evil, was worshipped. Imagine people worshipping the god of evil. Would they act like him too?”

He smiled at his musing and his dimples showed.