7

THE SAINT MUST HAVE ESCORTED me to the street where I was staying. I could see his back drawing away from me. He turned, smiled, and waved, then hurried off. I can remember nothing of what preceded that moment, nor anything that came after, but there is a vivid memory of waking up, all weariness and exhaustion gone, as though bone and muscle had been replaced while I slept.

Burhan buzzed around me and a zephyr from his beating wings tickled my face. I was in a state of rare contentment, and it seemed to me as though all my problems were gone. Not solved, but completely disappeared, without trace and never to return, and like any experienced drug user, I attributed this effect to the karbon I’d smoked the day before. The sunlight dazzled me. On the bed by my head sat the phone. I picked it up and saw that it was almost 9 a.m. Then, that the phone’s contents had been changed. There was a new icon on the screen—a musical note—and beneath it, ‘Abadir.’ I clicked on it and a menu opened of what I immediately recognized to be sound files: songs or tracks. Running my thumb down the screen, I came to one labeled “Beneath the Hammers’ Steel” and for a moment the portentous title seemed almost absurd, but that music I’d heard yesterday was still echoing around my head, and this was it. The Saint had added it to my phone like he’d promised. I set the track to play, then started searching for the speakers he’d mentioned. Burhan knocked against something, and when I turned to look I saw him sitting on the table, and beside him a set of speakers, and as I picked them up he flew into the air and did a flip. I plugged the speakers into the phone and the sound came pure and clear.

A whole hour went by. I listened to three of Abadir’s tracks, held fast beneath a bombardment of pounding beats, as though ten huge drums were being battered one after the other, no more than a tenth of a second between each one and the next—each second a sequence of drumbeats strung tightly together. I’d never heard the like before. I pictured a little pig submitting to a brute’s hammer, taking the blows without trying to flee, then whispering a plea for water. And I pictured the brutish man dropping his hammer, then bringing it water and letting it drink, and when the pig’s thirst was quenched resuming his battering. Was this from the karbon, too? Death had become strange to me.

The Saint’s call cut off the music abruptly and the phone’s ringtone blared out from the speakers. He was waiting for me downstairs, he said, and I asked him to come up and wait for me while I dressed. As I ended the call, I tried to remember what had happened the night before. I couldn’t remember him adding the music to the phone, nor what we’d talked about after the second hit of karbon.

I opened the apartment’s door and went back inside to wash. All my clothes were filthy, and I began feeling and sniffing them to see which were the least offensive. I had just picked some out and was heading for the bathroom when the Saint walked in, greeted me with a smile, and sat down to watch Burhan.

I washed, and emerged to find Burhan circling around the living room in an orbit whose center was the Saint. The Saint stood there, peering at him every time he flew past his face.

“I’m testing him,” the Saint said. “Looks like there’s nothing wrong with the wings or any of his mechanisms. Burhan’s okay.”

“Should I be testing him, too?” I asked.

“No need. In any case, Burhan’s mission is nearly over. You won’t be needing him after the revolution.” His certainty that a revolution would take place surprised me. I didn’t make any comment, not wanting to get into a long debate about the people, the revolution, the state, and the occupation. I’d tired of all that stuff long ago.

The Saint said, “How are you today? Did you like the karbon?”

“Definitely, but I don’t fully understand what it does. I’d like to try it again.”

“You don’t want us to go and buy hash, you mean?” He smiled. “Out with the old and in with the karbon?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I told you, I don’t really understand what happened to me and I want to experience it again. But you never said—what is karbon? Is it made in a lab?”

His smile widened. “It’s made in labs, for sure, but not the neat and clean laboratories you’re thinking of. But we can go to a karbon lab. There’s one by the foot of the Muqattam hill. Just fifteen minutes by car.”

Of course drug labs were dirty. Did he think I was new to the job?

“Will they let us in?” I asked. “They’re going to let two police officers take a look at what they’re up to?”

“You’re forgetting that we’re not officers any more. They don’t know anything about me other than that I’m a friend of the lab owner. And by the way, the owner’s a former officer as well.”

“In the resistance?” I asked.

“No, he decided to drop all that shit and make a living off karbon. He lives for the stuff.”

“Fine,” I said. “No problem, then, let’s go. Let’s forget the hash and try to get to the bottom of karbon. Once again: what’s it made of? Flowers or leaves of some kind?”

“You’ll see for yourself.”

We went out together, walking until we’d left the alleys and narrow lanes behind, and finally came to al-Azhar Street, jam-packed with cars, its sidewalks aswarm. “We’ll take a taxi,” said the Saint. I didn’t answer and turned to my left to wait for an empty cab, when I noticed a crowd standing about a hundred meters off, the people clustering on the sidewalk and part of the road, constricting it still further, the cars having great difficulty squeezing through what free space remained. They were all looking up at al-Azhar Bridge, which rose up in the center of the street and ran parallel overhead. I couldn’t see what held their attention, but the Saint tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go and see what’s happening over there.”

Up on the overpass stood a completely naked man wearing a yellow mask. After a few seconds, I realized that it was SpongeBob: yellow, square, with big white eyes and a childish grin, and in the center a hole where we could clearly see the man’s smiling face. He stood there, cars speeding past at his back, leaning his belly and elbows against the metal railing and spitting on the people below, shaking his hips at them, grinning. Next to him lay a thick rope, one end tied to the low rail, the other in a noose about his neck. The man had got himself his own private gallows, and on a grand scale—al-Azhar Bridge, no less. People were flinging abuse at him, and snorting derisively, and answering his shaking hips in kind. When he laughed at them and waved, they laughed and waved. When he stuck out his first and middle fingers to signal for a cigarette, one of them tossed him a pack, and the man deftly caught it, then took out a cigarette, and put it between his lips. He cocked his thumb to indicate a lighter and someone threw him one. The man lit the cigarette and calmly started to smoke, then he raised his leg, swung it over the bridge’s railing, and very cautiously set his foot down on the edge of the bridge’s outer lip. Next, he brought his second leg over and stood there, gripping the rail in both hands until he had his balance, then let go, grabbed his flaccid penis, and started urinating on the people down below, the cigarette still in his mouth. I thought I saw him shut his right eye as the smoke stung it—and then he jumped.

The man’s body swung sharply back and forth, his arms hung slack at his sides, and a thick stream of piss guttered from his cock. The rope sawed at his neck; then it cut into it and the wound began to bleed heavily, the blood covering his chest and belly then mixing with his urine, and the whole cocktail spattering down onto the ground and the spectators. I looked at the crowd and saw that they were standing and staring with great intensity at the swinging body. The blood dripped down onto the faces of some, but they paid no attention. One lifted his hand to wipe away drops that had fallen into his eye, then went back to gaping at the body. They were silent and focused, but unmoved by what they saw, like students at a lecture.

The cigarette still hung from the corpse’s mouth—still burning, the smoke floating up past his mask, held in place despite the violent motion of the body, and I thought that the butt must have stuck to his lower lip, the way cigarettes do when you leave them in your mouth for any length of time. The cigarette was still alight when I saw the first stone fly.

Then everyone followed suit, pelting him with stones from the ground, pieces of wood, bags of trash, shoes, tomatoes, and after a minute or so I heard the sound of gunfire and turned to find a man leveling a zip gun at the corpse and firing a second time, and a third, and a fourth, and then I realized that he wasn’t aiming at the corpse but at the rope, trying to sever it. The rope hung down from the bottom of the railing and no one standing on the bridge would be able to reach down far enough to cut it.

Then lots of people lifted their guns and started shooting at the rope, and the tiny pellets spread out to hit the body and the bridge, and to bounce back and strike the people who stood there, unmoving, and the body was spangled with pellets now, and then the rope broke, and the people sprinted for the corpse.

The Saint grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the crowd. “We have to get away from all this,” he said. “No taxi’s going to come down this street for at least an hour. Did the guy really have to commit suicide right now?”

“You care that much about the timing?” I replied. “The man killed himself and that’s all there is to it.”

“Of course I care. He lost this world, and the next, and that’s his choice. But given the gridlock his suicide’s going to cause, I’d say he got it wrong.”

Which was perfectly logical, I thought, though the phrase ‘he lost this world, and the next’ was not. I said, “Quite right, and the guy really has lost the next world . . . but you can’t say he’s lost this world. How can you lose the shit we’re in now?”

The Saint laughed. “There’s still pleasure to be had down here. Life’s not all shit. Maybe we’re in paradise and we don’t know it!”

I thought that perhaps the Saint was testing my faith by talking about this world and the next. Is that what you’re doing, Saint? I don’t like those games, my friend. We had walked on down al-Azhar Street a fair distance from the crowd, and the cars had completely vanished from the road, when the Saint said, “Even in the worst prisons, there’s pleasure. There’s pleasure in the State Security lockups, my friend. That’s why nobody ever commits suicide in prison.”

The Saint really was a well-meaning fellow—or perhaps I wasn’t understanding what he was getting at—but his mentioning suicide and State Security reminded me of the ‘State Security Dilemma,’ which had been very popular with us officers years ago. I asked him and he denied ever having heard of it. We were close to al-Hussein by now, and the usual crowds thronged the sidewalks by the mosque.

“It’s a riddle, famous among the officers—I’ve no idea how you haven’t heard it before. I first heard it a long time ago, as part of an attempt to answer a big question: why don’t people kill themselves in prison? Anyway, these three Salafis—Mohamed, Mahmoud, and Ahmed—are being held at State Security headquarters. Every day, they’re tortured in all sorts of ways, then they’re taken back to a single cell where they sleep till the next day, when they wake up and the torture begins all over again. This goes on for a long time, and then one night Mohamed wakes his cellmates up. He’s beaming with delight and he tells them he’s found a solution to their terrible dilemma. He says that they’re being tortured beyond endurance, and that they’ve got no secret information that they could possibly confess. The fact is they’re perfectly prepared to confess to anything, but the torturers never let them know the thing they’re meant to be confessing to, and so Mohamed thinks the torturers must be doing it for their own pleasure.”

At this point, the Saint broke in, laughing. “Fine then! So here’s a Salafi who realizes that some of the officers in State Security are enjoying themselves. Didn’t I tell you we might be in paradise?”

I ignored him and went on: “If that’s the case, Mohamed says, then the torture will only end when they are dead, and for no other reason. Mohamed volunteers to be the first killer: he’ll kill Mahmoud, and then Ahmed will kill Mohamed, and that way they’ll be free of the torture, and surely God will forgive the killers for their heinous crime, which they only committed in order to relieve themselves of the agony.”

The Saint broke in again. “What about the last Salafi? Does he commit suicide?”

I continued: “At this point, Ahmed objects. They are leaving him to a terrible fate, he says. He has no problem with one of them killing him, but he won’t be the last killer, living on under torture until he is sentenced to death. So Mohamed tells him he can commit suicide. God’s certain to pardon his great sin because he wasn’t choosing to kill himself willingly.”

The Saint was fully engaged. “But it’s a trick!” he cried. “A suicide can never go to heaven, even if he kills himself in a noble cause like that.”

I was on the point of asking him if it really was such a noble cause, but I went on: “And that was Ahmed’s point as well. He says he doesn’t have the guts to kill himself, and even if he was presented with a religious edict saying he could, he still wouldn’t do it. For the second time, he says he’s willing to be killed by one of his cellmates, but he won’t let himself be left till last.”

I fell silent. The story was over but the Saint, it seemed, didn’t get it. “Then what?” he asked. “What happened to them?”

“Nothing. None of them did anything and to this day they’re still being tortured. The point, my friend, is that prisoners don’t commit suicide precisely because they’re looking forward to a better life when they get out, or after they’re dead, perhaps—or even because life in prison is preferable to life on the outside.”

I lit a cigarette.

“Did you know that Salafis believe the torture they undergo in prison is a kind of cleansing of their sins? They think they’ll go to heaven as a reward for their suffering on earth. Basically, that we get them into heaven ourselves by virtue of the things we do to them. And of course, if they die from the torture or if we shoot them, they’re martyrs, and they go straight to paradise.”

Smiling, the Saint asked, “And will they?”

“Of course not! They’re insane, they’re killing machines! It’s just that they’re unarmed. Hand them a weapon and see what they do.”

The Saint’s smile disappeared and he looked down at the ground as he walked on. For a moment, I imagined that he was mulling over what I’d said and what I’d done while stationed up in the tower. Would the people I’d killed really be going to heaven? Was I an angel of mercy, dispatching people to paradise? Had I ever killed anyone who deserved it—or was I just an instrument, its purpose to deliver people from this loathsome world? I could find nothing to say and I saw that I was just the same as those I’d described as killing machines—that I was conflicted and foolish—but that I had been given a gun, and I wondered to myself what Burhan was thinking as he sat there on my shoulder, drawing energy from my movements and storing it away.

But the Saint made no comment. We had come to Salah Salim Street, and silently we crossed over to the other side.

We walked through the tombs, heading to Manshiyat Nasr. The crowds pressed in and I thought to myself that the dead here outnumbered the living, and at my first glimpse of the tombstones terror gripped me. But with each step taken and each tombstone passed my indifference returned, and the tombstones became stones once more, the ground just dirt, and beneath it mere lifeless bones. The smell of the fine dust filled my nose and I spied two groups of people, gathered by a pair of graves and burying two bodies. Tears, and prayers, and Quran recitals, and little leaflets, farewells, and pleas not for justice but for mercy, entreaties for a timely reconciliation with the departed, since life without them was insupportable, since life itself was insupportable . . . and the solution? That we depart this world in expectation of another, less full of torment—of a hell less full of torment than this world. At least in hell we would know that we were being tormented, would be certain that we were paying the price for our sins here, and that this price would be paid out in the end, and that better lay ahead—all contrary to what we’d seen today and knew for a fact: that worse was to come.

And I saw spent syringes strewn upon the ground, and the many bottles of many different cough medicines, and bones both old and new—whether human or animal, I did not know. We walked on, and the dead in their caskets beneath us looked up at us and wished that we might stop and talk, if only for a while. But we were in a hurry, and we did not stop and talk to them.

Without warning, the Saint spoke up. “People only commit suicide in very rare cases, friend. As you said, they live in hope of a better existence in some place other than this. All men dream of eternal life in heaven.”

He fell silent for a moment, then: “But suicides have their logic, too. If they’re atheists, then they’re not expecting anything after death and what might happen there doesn’t bother them. All they care about is being delivered, liberated, from this world. If they’re believers, then they are going to think they will be in hell for eternity because of their sins, whether they commit suicide or not. In either case, they commit suicide because they have lost hope: the hope for a better existence in this world or the next. They see what we are blind to. Simply put, hope robs us of our sight.”

It had been a long time since I’d considered such things. I was about to embark upon indiscriminate mass murder, but it was the Saint—who had never killed a soul—who was thinking on these matters. Had I lost my faith?

He went on. “Maybe we’d see the world differently if we knew we were in hell for ever.”

“And the man who jumped from al-Azhar Bridge?” I asked. “Was he a believer or an atheist?”

The Saint laughed. “Well, of course I’ve no idea. Maybe he saw something you’ve never seen. Knows something you don’t. You can’t pass judgment on someone who pisses on passersby, then jumps bare-naked and breaks his neck.”

Where had the days of the classic suicide gone? The note to the lover, the bottle of poison, the rope from the ceiling, the sleeping pills, the wrists slit lengthways, and, of course, the severe depression leading up to the final act?

We were through the tombs and Manshiyat Nasr appeared before us. The Saint was tired of walking, it seemed, and he flagged down a tuktuk to take us to the other side of the neighborhood. As he clambered in, he said, “We’ll drive through Manshiyat Nasr to the foot of Muqattam. We’re pretty close now, it won’t take more than ten minutes.”

Farida was still on my mind and I’d see her today, for sure. I’d wasted my first day in East Cairo but today I had nothing to do. I’d go back to Sharif Street and look for her. Burhan, who I’d forgotten all about, suddenly flew off my shoulder and landed on the Saint’s head. The Saint laughed and made no comment, and the tuktuk driver glanced at us in the mirror and smiled. Then Burhan returned to his perch on my shoulder. For some reason, the Saint’s words echoed in my head and I thought to myself that both the suicide and the Saint—and maybe Burhan, too—knew what I did not.

The tuktuk stopped when the last buildings appeared ahead of us. Cairo’s outermost point: Manshiyat Nasr, the tombs, Salah Salim, and the rest of the city behind us, and before us the vast cliff face of Muqattam. We walked for a while over uneven ground, the base of the cliff ahead of us and not far away—though very far from any buildings, roads, or humans, and surrounded by a broad expanse of wasteland and an electric fence—the Knights of Malta’s rocket launchers sat ranged across a hillock. It was from this point that they had bombarded West Cairo. I looked behind me and saw the ghost of the Cairo Tower far, far away, enveloped in a miasma of dust and smoke, and I had no idea if it was empty or if someone was stationed there.

The Saint started scaling the hillock’s sloped side, now and then resorting to his hands to help him climb. In a state of great excitement, I followed him until we came to a narrow, level platform about a meter high that looked like a table, missing only chairs and a feast. I noticed a trace of water on the stone surface, as though the clouds had rained over just this tiny patch and it had not yet dried. We went down steps carved out of the stone behind the platform, and I saw a hollow, like a narrow little valley, into which the Saint walked with me following after, and then, as if by magic, there was a brand new door set into a sandy, yellow rock wall. The Saint knocked, the door was opened, and we went in.

A cramped tunnel led to a cramped chamber in which a man stood carrying a Kalashnikov with its safety catch engaged. He seemed perfectly calm, but when he caught sight of me he flicked the safety catch off, and his eyes and trigger finger tensed. The Saint raised his palm in the man’s face and said, “Relax, he’s with me,” but he didn’t relax, just gripped his gun. We stood there until another man came and searched us for weapons. He searched us with the scrupulousness and courtesy of a veteran cop. I know what a policeman’s hand feels like when he searches you without wanting to humiliate you, and if it hadn’t been for the man clinging to the Kalashnikov I would have asked him his rank.

We passed through another door and down a long passage, which branched into many more passages and tunnels. We were underground, the walls and ceiling of solid Muqattam rock, rough to the touch—the roughness of age and immutability. I was now properly lost in the network of impossibly narrow shafts. I couldn’t remember which way we’d come, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to make it back alone. No weapon, and I didn’t know anyone here except the Saint; my survival depended on his.

“Ready?” the Saint asked. “We’ll be going into the first room where they collect the raw material.”

Then he opened a door and a powerful, organic stench rolled out.

Numerous barrels were set on the ground and a man stood among them wearing rubber boots reaching to the knee and jeans, while his unclothed upper body revealed his extreme skinniness. He turned to us, then went back to inspecting the sieve in his hand, passing his fingers through a large hole in the mesh and trying to gauge its width.

Curious, I went over to the closest barrel, looked in, and found that it was full of little scarabs—hundreds and hundreds of black beetles covered by a thin layer of soil, some of them attempting to flee by scaling the inner walls of their barrel but slipping back down the smooth surface. I froze, trying to understand what was going on.

The Saint lit a cigarette and told the man he’d put it out in just a second, then went over to another barrel. “This,” I heard him say, “is how Egyptians started consuming karbon. . . .” He stuck the hand holding the cigarette into the barrel, moved his arm around as though searching for something, then pulled it out. A fat red ant was stuck on the tip of the lit cigarette, beating the air with its spindly legs as it tried to flee. The Saint lifted the cigarette to his mouth, eyes fixed on the ant in case it fell, then took a very long drag; the coal glowed and the ant convulsed. I saw it drumming its front legs against its head. The Saint took another drag, and halfway through the ant stopped moving. A pungent smell filled the room, the smell of a red ant burnt to death. Then the Saint took a third drag, and the corpse curled up completely and became a black dot, bearing no resemblance to the creature it had been. He let the cigarette fall and stamped to extinguish it. “That’s the lowest grade karbon,” he said. “The ants. What you smoked yesterday was the best—the sacred scarab of our forefathers.”