10

THERE WEREN’T MANY PEOPLE IN Ataba Square, no more than a hundred perhaps, wearily looking on as several individuals were hanged on the high stage. It was a procedure performed as pure routine: the condemned stood beneath the gallows, then the executioner placed the noose about his neck, took a few steps back, and opened the trap, and the body dropped away, suspended from the rope. A few minutes later, the body was slowly lifted back up, listing a little, but with enough slack in the rope to let the knot be loosened. The executioner approached and removed the head from the noose, the body was gradually lowered into the base of the stage, and the next convict stepped forward to take his place.

I walked down Adly Street. They had impaled a large number of men outside the synagogue and left them there, their blood smearing the stakes. It was a far bloodier spectacle than the hanging, but people were passing by without giving the bodies so much as a second glance. A number of officers sat there, their shoulders beneath the corpses’ feet, fiddling with their phones and reading the papers.

On Talaat Harb Street, two men had been strung up from lampposts. The legs of each man had been roped together, while their bodies dangled free, arms hanging straight down. From the neck of one of them, a sign had been hung. I couldn’t make out the words, so I went right up and peered, and though the letters became crystal clear, I still couldn’t read a thing.

Close by Talaat Harb Square, the soldiers had stacked a great quantity of corpses into a small hill. I walked by the hill with the other people, but only two or three turned to look.

I couldn’t decide: should I enter Tahrir from Qasr al-Nil Street or from Talaat Harb? I didn’t want to go the long way around and enter the square from the far side. As I stood there on the corner of Talaat Harb Street, I could clearly see the great edifice of the Mogamma in Tahrir. I walked down the street, which had started to become crowded. On the corner of Hoda Shaarawi Street stood blue barrels containing severed heads and a great green skip full of headless bodies. There was much blood underfoot, still slippery in some places but mainly dried; when my foot struck the solid, clotted lumps, the crust peeled off to reveal layers of a dark, sticky red. By now my shoes were disgusting, and I paused for a moment to contemplate the fact that I had never before walked in such dirty shoes.

Coming into Tahrir Square, I turned instinctively to look at the Cairo Tower. I pictured a sniper up there, watching the square, watching me, tracking me through his scope as I walked toward its dead center. I grinned and waved, looking toward the balcony where I used to stand. There were a huge number of people in the square, and the sheer scale of the vast stage suggested that many more would be along soon. The stage rose up in the middle of the square, about three meters high and running away either side of a black-clad executioner, who was lifting boxes up from the interior of the stage through a trapdoor I couldn’t see. Then he opened the boxes and took out his tools, which he laid out on a table that stood at center stage, the black of his outfit broken only by three stars gleaming on either shoulder.

I pushed through the standing spectators until the dense crowd around the base of the stage prevented me from going further. There were no women where I stood. Only a few wore masks; the rest had left their faces uncovered.

We were silent, waiting for what would happen. A suffocating reek of sweat rose off the crowd. They looked exhausted and unshaven. Many were barefoot, their clothes ragged and ill fitting. I was a stranger among them.

Teams of cockroaches spread through the crowd, muscles quivering, their chests, and arms, and shoulders tensed. At first, I assumed this was a show of strength, a display, but none of it was intentional. Their youthful bodies surged and bobbed unconsciously, out of control.

A doctor climbed onto the stage, dapper in white coat and spectacles. From his capacious bag, he took flexible tubes, monitors, syringes, and pouches containing a colorless solution. These he laid out on the table alongside the executioner’s tools.

I felt shudders run down my arm and beneath my armpit, and a great weight pressing down on my shoulders. I had difficulty breathing. Then the pain struck my back and my muscles convulsed.

A hatch in the floor of the stage was opened and the executioner brought Farida out from below. I knew her body immediately—I didn’t need to wait for the executioner to lift the black hood from her head.

She was dressed in red, her head held high, and was looking into the executioner’s face, studying him. They had cut her hair, and the neck I adored seemed terribly thin.

The executioner took her by the arm and led her to the front of the stage, facing the crowds, then he made her turn around, showing her off to them, and they went wild: howls, and whistles, and cries, arms raised high in celebration. And all the while the sky pressed down.

The executioner stripped the red dress off her—she had been wearing nothing else—and began gesturing at her breasts. He looked out at the crowds and lifted his hand to his chin in mock wonder. He thrust out his forefinger, alerting them to the missing nipple.

Then he took a scalpel from the table beside him, sliced away her other nipple, and tossed it to the crowd.

The people behind me surged forward, their expressions dazed and lifeless. They wanted to grab the nipple at any cost, but it was lost underfoot. The stink of sweat enveloped us, rank and overwhelming.

The executioner brought her back to center stage, her breast bleeding. He tied her to a stout post that stuck up out of the boards and shackled her neck with an iron ring fixed to the post.

The doctor stuck a needle in her neck, attached it to a pouch of the colorless solution, and hooked up a monitor to her chest. Then he bound her arms together just above the elbows with strips of white cloth.

The executioner was merciful: he decided to cut her hands off in one go, not to snip the fingers off one by one. He cut quickly and without much blood, then threw them to the crowd. Their excitement increased and they swarmed around the hands.

With the same scalpel, he sliced the skin and flesh off her right elbow, then started cutting through the joint with a saw. He threw the arm to the crowd. Then he cut off another piece and threw that, too.

At the executioner’s direction, a second man emerged from inside the stage and stood behind Farida. He grasped her breasts and held her against the wooden post, and now the executioner worked fast. He cut off both her legs at the knees.

I was injured several times—people were squabbling violently over the body parts being tossed down to them. The second executioner released Farida and left her to thrash about, suspended from her neck and trying to get free from the iron ring, and all around me were many people standing stock still, faces raised. They had dropped their trousers and were masturbating.

The two men now settled what was left of Farida into a raised chair. The executioner cut in a circle around the base of each breast, digging deeper and deeper until he’d removed them both. Then he threw them to the crowd. The powerful smell of sperm mixed with that of the sweat, and I could no longer feel the pain or the great weight pressing down. I was free at last.

Men were standing around me, utterly naked, with sperm dripping from their cocks. One of them began to club the heads of his neighbors with a short metal pipe that rang with every blow, yet no one paid him or his blows any heed. Even those he was assaulting didn’t move.

Then I heard the sound of gunfire, and many of those standing by the stage fell down. Someone was shooting from beneath the stage to clear space for themselves. A group of masked men dressed in black with bulletproof vests emerged. They waved their guns at the crowd, and three of them brought out a vast, polished mirror. It gleamed in the sun, and at its base I could see huge wheels. They rolled it over the fallen bodies, wobbling and almost falling, until it had passed over all those lying there.

They made a quarter turn in front of the stage, the mirror turning with them, and I could see the buildings and the blue sky behind them reflected in the surface facing me—as though I were looking into another hell.

Then they stopped in front of Farida and the executioner lifted her head to face the mirror. Her eyes locked on it. Farida was still alive, and she smiled.

Then the executioner unclasped the iron ring and, with his colleague’s help, he lifted her up and threw her to the crowd.

Hundreds descended on Farida. I fell down, feet trampling every part of me, and I grabbed at a passing leg and brought down its owner, and many more who were coming after him fell down in turn. And when the crowd’s rush had subsided, I was able, with difficulty, to get to my feet.

I looked for Farida, but she was too important for them to have left her behind. The crowd stampeded to the edge of the square, and I ran with them, and I caught glimpses of Farida’s body being tossed from hand to hand, the crowd tossing it back and forth, soaked in blood. It would be visible for an instant, then vanish for seconds at a time, then appear again, growing bloodier and bloodier every time.

At last, they hoisted her aloft and ran with her toward Mohamed Mahmoud Street. I could see her terrified face. Terror upon terror, as Zahra had said.

Wasn’t there to be a moment of unconsciousness? Wasn’t my torment to be lessened?

And Farida—wasn’t she going to die?

A cold wind gusted over us, blowing in from where Farida could still be seen, and I knew that this was death’s mercy, come to us at long last. And I wept, for I had given up hope that death would ever come.

Then those carrying Farida fell down at last, and she fell with them.

And death passed between the people, like a wave taking them, raising up souls and casting bodies down. They were dying in mid-motion, then dropping. And then the wave approached me and passed me. It passed me by, and ran away behind me.

And in not more than a single second, the great uproar was turned to total silence. Even those who remained standing were silent, gazing stonily at the fallen all about them.

Then those who were left joined battle, weeping bitterly as they pounded heads with their fists. A man gouged out another man’s eye and tried to pull out his jaw. A man bit into another man’s neck and the blood spurted forth. Two men were throttling one another, each gripping the other’s neck with his hands and yanking upward, and then one died and released the neck of the other, who still held him upright by his neck, continuing to choke him even though he had passed, keening, and shrieking, and shaking the body left and right.

Why do I not die?

I walked toward the spot where Farida had fallen, my feet stumbling over the freshly dead, avoiding those who fought all around me, forced to drop to my knees and to crawl on all fours to reach her, to lay my hands on the flesh and on the heads. The wind was blowing in my face, carrying the full stink of the rotting corpses and the fevered cries of struggling men.

Farida had gone to ground at the beginning of Mohamed Mahmoud Street. I made it there and looked for her body, but I couldn’t find it. It had vanished beneath the others and nothing of it could be seen, and I thought to myself that hell would end now, and that there was no point in burying her.

And I turned back toward the square and the setting sun, to find that all the bodies were gone away. They were gone, along with the stage—there was nothing at all on the ground and nothing behind me.

My knees were touching the asphalt. There were no bodies beneath me, not even Farida’s.

I studied the streets on every side—Qasr al-Aini, and Mohamed Mahmoud, and Talaat Harb—and there was nothing in any of them: no cars, no people. I was alone.

And slowly but surely, I saw hell come to an end.

Every sound around me was gone away, except for the sound of the wind that blew and stirred my clothes. Then even that slackened, until it was no more and the sound of it was gone from my ears.

And I heard no sound save my own heart beating in the midst of the silence—nothing around me now save the buildings of hell, its streets, and lanes, and shop signs, no trace of man at all. And then my heartbeat slowed, and its sound faded until it was gone.

I no longer heard anything at all.

Then I saw that I had been a policeman in the world, and I saw that I had been a policeman in many different lives in many hells, and a million million images passed before me in which I saw everything: how I had tormented people and been tormented by them.

And I saw that hell was eternal and unbroken, changeless and undying; and that in the end, all other things would pass away and nothing besides remain. And I knew that I was in hell forevermore, and that I belonged here.