2

TODAY MARKED THREE MONTHS SINCE Evacuation Day. It was all over—the troops of the Fourth and Fifth Armies of the Knights of Malta had left the country and we had reclaimed every inch of Egypt; had reclaimed, too, after great but short-lived celebrations, all our hardship and all our torment.

The ice cube melted quickly.

I rose from the bed and opened the fridge, took out another ice cube, and enclosed it in my fist. Every time I wanted to escape this idea of hell, I held an ice cube to assure myself that there was biting cold here, the polar opposite of what I knew of hell. In the end, though, the ice would always melt and confirm that hell was where we were.

How was it people hadn’t noticed? How did I not pick up on it before? Perhaps we were too caught up in creating paths, taking certain actions and avoiding others in order to escape hell once we’d died, never realizing that we were already here, for real, in torment.

Farida would be here in a few minutes. She’d finished work at the hospital an hour before, enough time to get here from Abbasiya via al-Azhar Street. We’d thought a lot about relocating to an apartment in Abbasiya to reduce the distance between work and home, or even a little pad in New Cairo. An hour on Cairo’s public transport was a long time, ultimately twice as exhausting and grueling as a full day on the job. But Farida had taken a drag on her cigarette and said that she liked it here. I wondered whether Farida knew that we were in hell, whether she realized that every day we were being tormented in a thousand different ways. Farida no longer had any choice over what she could wear, and the money she’d put away during her months on the game would soon be spent. The hospital salary wasn’t enough and she was forced to withdraw a sum from her bank account every few days. She hadn’t withdrawn a single pound when she worked as a prostitute, she told me: her income had covered her needs and more. I quickly worked out what she’d been making—fifty pounds per client, and an extra fifty for any special requests; when business was good, that came to five hundred pounds a day. No need for detailed comparisons; this figure was more than her entire monthly salary. True, she’d left behind the heavy bodies, the sweat and stink of strangers, but now she faced a torment of a different kind.

Farida had abandoned medicine early on—a few days before I’d met her, in fact. She had finished her postgraduate year of training and had immediately taken off for one of the brothels on Sharif Street. This was just after the prostitution law had been passed, and she’d walked into the brothel owner’s office weighed down with her hatred of human bodies, of all bodies. Later, she told me that she’d made her mind up months before she ever set foot in that office—after one hundred days working at the hospital, to be precise. Her colleague in the emergency ward had been a little older than her and thus more experienced, and on that hundredth day more than sixteen individuals had died beneath his hands. A man had been brought into the emergency room on the verge of death, then his heart had stopped and her colleague had tried reviving him. He’d failed. He’d failed every time. Not one of the dying had been wounded by a bullet or hit by shrapnel from a resistance bombing. Some turned up after falling from scaffolding on building sites, following car accidents, or in the wake of heart attacks. The last one had been like that: Farida said that she had been a young and extremely beautiful woman, a fine tracery of veins showing through her white skin. She had been dead, actually dead, but Farida’s colleague had asked Farida to massage her heart anyway. The girl was young, he’d told Farida, her heart might start working again, but Farida hadn’t had the courage and so, without directing any blame toward Farida, the doctor had attempted to revive her instead.

Fifteen dead bodies in a single day had been more than enough for her colleague, Farida said, and he had been determined to bring the girl back from the brink—and, when he’d lost his mind and begun ramming down on her chest with all his strength in an effort to get her heart started, several of her ribs had been crushed by the sheer force. Farida had heard the sound of breaking bone and had been unable to stay on her feet. The doctor must have heard it, too, but he had continued pressing down and crushing the ribcage, and then the broken end of one rib had thrust through the skin of her chest and jutted out, white and lightly smeared with blood. Farida said that the girl had looked like she was sleeping, not the slightest trace of death in her face, but the protruding bone and the twisted lines of the smashed ribs beneath her skin told a different story.

Farida told me how all of a sudden she had perceived how terribly weak the human body was—an unbelievably fragile machine—and in a flash, everything she’d learned at medical school had come back to her, each detail confirming what she’d just that minute understood: that skin is easily cut; that everything runs off the heart and there is no alternative mechanism; that the neck vertebrae are quickly broken; that eyes stop functioning at the smallest injury; that if the brain suffers the slightest damage, the limbs and senses stop working; that brain cells are never replaced; that any one of thousands of viruses can bring a body to a grinding halt in mere hours. It took the sight of the rib’s broken end to bring these simple facts home. In that instant, she understood that this body of hers could earn her stacks of money without any call for mental exertion, for desperate efforts to help the sick cling onto life, to keep these clinging cases happy, for anything else that might remind her of the body’s great frailty.

The brothel owner had been very practical, she said, hadn’t seemed like a brothel owner at all, in fact—more like the well- heeled director of a private company. As she came in, he had been poring through a pile of documents, and she’d noticed that the pages in his hands were covered in tables, stats, and graphs, that she’d assumed were related in some way to the trade and projections for its future potential. He had asked her for her date of birth, whether she was able to work long hours, and about her previous experience; and when she’d told him, shamefacedly, that she’d just left the hospital, he’d said that it happened a lot, and that he always welcomed doctors and nurses because they could work under pressure: they were fine with things that other women felt were insulting, they didn’t treat their bodies like they were precious objects. And, of course, most importantly of all, they knew exactly how sexual diseases were transmitted and how to protect themselves. He had asked if she’d had any experience with clients, if she’d ever slept with a man for money, and then if she could cope with unconventional requests. And when she’d said that she would do anything, he’d replied that that was excellent, that conventional was so rare these days it qualified as a kink. Did she understand what he meant? She had understood perfectly. He’d asked her to remove her clothes so that he could inspect her body, so she’d stood up and taken it all off.

He hadn’t looked at her for long, but said she would have to try first with one of the professionals—as a little test, no more. He had been very polite, had said that she might find she didn’t like doing it with strangers, that she might not care for the fetish that was the fashion back then. And then they’d set a date.

Farida had been tormented in the hospital, and her colleague with her, and it was the patients who had come in on the verge of death that had tormented them. They were all cogs in an endlessly complex, highly efficient, astonishingly precise machine: a torture device far greater than the human body. And it seemed that the cog that was Farida had not been turning as it should and had been moved to another section of the same machine, where it might turn with maximum efficiency—for the machine could never stop.

The ice cube melted. Was this the tenth? The sting had gone and my hand no longer hurt.

Farida came in, worn out as always. She removed her lightweight hijab and hugged me for a long time without speaking, then let me go and headed for the bed, saying she was going to take a nap.

Is there still hope in the streets, Farida?

My phone rang, and an officer said that there’d be a small raid tomorrow on the karbon plant in Port Said Street. A police unit would rush the place, round up five or six bodies, and confiscate everything they found. I put a call through to the lab owner, told him everything, and advised him to leave behind a full barrel of scarabs and one each of ants and cockroaches. If he cleared the lab out completely, I said, that could leave me and my informant in the Interior Ministry exposed. Then I asked for seven thousand pounds in exchange for the tip-off. Of course, the man had no option but to do as he was told, but in any case, the seven thousand wasn’t just for me: my source would take three and would pass on maybe a thousand of that to whoever had brought him the info. The lab owner said he’d leave behind three guys he wanted to get rid of, and asked if it would be possible for him to bribe the officers later in order to recover some of the confiscated karbon. I didn’t care about the details any more. I told him that that wasn’t going to happen: the quantities involved were too small. As I ended the call, I wondered whether we were supposed to be trying to make a living in hell or whether this was just another torment.

I hadn’t smoked a karbon cigarette for three months and I didn’t need one now, or rather I no longer felt the same delight escaping into the nothingness. Generally people would stop using karbon for a few weeks, then go back to consuming it in far greater quantities. At first, the police had mounted entirely genuine surprise raids and had confiscated what they found, and then, with time, information about each raid had started leaking out to the dealers and lab owners. I and others had played middlemen in these leaks, and everything had more or less gone back to how it had been. I thought to myself that though I might one day return to karbon, I’d never touch hash again.

Farida confessed to me that karbon had saved her from suicide on several occasions. She used to karbon before she went to work; who knew, maybe she karboned in the taxi without caring what the driver taking her to Sharif Street thought. The months she’d spent as a prostitute had left her relatively unaffected and it was all thanks to karbon—plus it was the karbon that had compensated her for my two-year absence up the tower. Living on karbon had been much more pleasant than she’d imagined. She’d only been physically aware of her body for a few hours a day, and her disappearance into what she called ‘the night’ was a flight from everything that took place in her room at work. She couldn’t remember a thing from those days. Now that she was back working at the hospital, she might occasionally come across patients who’d been clients. She’d recognize them from the look of surprise on their faces when they saw her. Surprise, turning to a shamefaced grin that would have become a leer were it not for the fact that there were other people about—not to mention her stern demeanor and hijab, which halted any such developments in their tracks. The patient who’d been her client would put her out of his mind and leave.

The day would come when Farida would go back to taking karbon at work. She would turn into a tirelessly functioning machine, her mind escaped into her ‘night.’ She would return home to sleep until the effects had worn off, would flee from the patients who slowly but surely passed away—though death was the kindest form of mercy in this hell of ours. But Farida preferred karbon. It helped her.

Tomorrow, a force from the ministry would raid the karbon lab. I knew just where it was; I’d visited it many times. They’d confiscate the goods and arrest those they found there. And maybe, if they wanted to make the play perfect, they’d shoot one of them, and the officers would testify that he’d raised his gun, and fired two shots, but missed. And maybe the lab’s owner would get angry, and things would snowball, and he’d return the favor, killing an officer or two. And so the wheel would turn and the whole thing would get completely out of hand, the cops and lab owners going at it tit for tat until the dealers were nearly wiped out. And then one of the heavyweights might intervene, might demand that the pressure on the labs be slackened given their importance, and one generation of dealers would be replaced by another—smarter and better organized—and then things could move on some more, members of parliament legalizing karbon just as they’d done for prostitution; in any case, these weren’t drugs being smoked, but insects, and the smoker wasn’t left listless and idle, quite the opposite—and nor did they hallucinate. Plus, it offered a little relief from ceaseless torment.