This is a repost of my “Maspero massacre” piece on the occasion of yesterday’s events, with a series of seven door pictures made with my iPhone 5 and a video with footage of the September 2011 events and the Coptic Church version of the Lamentations of Jeremiah
What the author of Book of the Sultan’s Seal said about his companion, the protagonist of the novel and hero of the tale, after the events in the World’s Gate, or Downtown Cairo, from February to November 2011.
The oblivious body by qisasukhra
A second excerpt from Youssef Rakha’s التماسيح (Dar Al Saqi, 2012) [The Crocodiles].
194. “You know you’re a coward?” she said, for the first time staring into his eyes without confusion or uncertainty. She hadn’t completely finished tying the ponytail when she looked at him and he couldn’t believe it. “I’m the first to tell you?” Not a flicker; just the first signs of a smile upon her lips. “You really are a son of a dog’s religion of a coward.” And before he could give expression to his astonishment he found his arm in motion, as if of its own accord. “A coward,” she was saying, “because you’re not prepared to exchange your position for another, even in your imagination. You’re scared to put yourself in a woman’s place because you’re scared to ask yourself whether, in those circumstances, you would marry. This isn’t a fear like the human sentiment with which to varying degrees we’re all familiar: it carries a moral presumption and a glib satisfaction with your own circumstances. That’s why I’m telling you you’re a son of a dog’s religion of a coward…”
195. And this, as I see it, was precisely Moon’s genius. When she came out with abrupt and sudden declarations of this sort it was with a tremendous energy, an intentness that summoned thoughts of the weak standing up to the strong, the revolutionary to his oppressor, and she would make the man before her feel, in consequence, that her words came forth from a deep place: that she’d thought hard about it and that it pained her. Her subtlety in inferring views, which her inner cogency or indifference would not permit her to air more comprehensively, was what gleamed in her eyes as her lips quivered. Meanwhile the truth was that she said things by way of experiment and cared deeply only about their immediate impact; things that sprang from an absolute lack of cogency. Moon would lie, tentatively, without believing herself, and the things she said were clichés even though our admiration of the speaker might mask the fact. This was the genius Nayf fell for, despite his shrewdness, because it was—as I see it—a genius of cliché, while Paulo and I, with the less brains or the greater weakness, hooked the Joke and the Slogan.
196. She was saying, “That’s why I’m telling you,” when Nayf’s palm settled on her cheek. And when the palm slid down to her neck she went on: “You’re a son of a dog’s religion of a coward. Am I right or what? When you said that it makes no difference…”
197. It wasn’t a slap precisely, though the arm was raised, the palm stretched rigid and the shoulders a straight line through a circle’s centre. It was like the threat of a slap, which Moon would have returned immediately had she not lost her balance beneath the weight of the slapper, now standing over her head. As he turned to face her she tottered and swayed, until she came to rest cross-legged on the couch, her long summer dress hitched up off a brown and slender thigh. At which point she looked him in his eyes again. She herself did not know if something in her gaze was different but it no longer fazed him that she looked.
198. A thigh, brown and slender, but aglow and suffused, and her long thick hair, numberless streaked chestnut strands gathered in a ponytail, and her, looking at him. Did Nayf recall the lion? Did the recollection affect an energy pulsing in his body, that was like desire and was not desire? A rosy thigh and thick hair and breath of basil with a pulsing energy and her hair and a brown and slender thigh.
199. Moon did not flinch as the palm encircled her nape, the thumb settling on the Adam’s apple, and it did not seem that she was immediately aware of Nayf’s other hand tugging the ponytail down as he returned to his seat beside her, chest-out this time; only, with the thumb’s pressure and her head’s canting back, her voice became strangled till she stopped speaking, then a faint whine was heard followed by panting—her lips clamped tight—as though it did not come from her. And though she did not laugh when he hissed in her ear, “This son of a dog’s religion is your mother’s dad,” it came as no surprise to him that she didn’t resist. “Your mother’s dad… daughter of a whore.” He was bringing his face up to hers so that his forehead settled on her nose, as if to crush it. And she was pressing her lips together ever more violently, her breath was drawing closer while her knees parted little by little, further and further.
200. Recalling a gathering of the Crocodiles which took place weeks before that night I can almost hear Nayf, cackling derisively at a scene of a masked man flogging two pale buttocks, all that showed of a woman straitjacketed in steel and black leather, on the Internet. How, then, was his thumb now on the verge of sinking an Adam’s apple into the throat of a girl kneeling on phosphorescent plush? Later, Moon will tell him that the marks left by his hands and teeth, if she had seen or heard of them on any other girl just a day before that night, would have filled her with disgust.
201. “And yet,” she will go on, with that sour grin of hers which scattered the beauty from her face “it seems I like abuse and caveman stuff. With you, baby, I’ve found what I deserve.”
202. In 2001, and up till now perhaps, in our conception of civilization—Nargis and Saba’s conception, Moon’s conception, of civilization—the sweetness of sex was incompatible with physical violence. Especially when the violence came from a man and was directed towards a woman, we viewed it as nothing more than an unnuanced machismo exercising its unreconstructed masculinity; it never occurred to one of us that it might be probing psychological depths quite unrelated to any worldview blowing in from behind the buffalo. Power, possession and absolute loyalty—unlike “self-development”—were things we distanced ourselves from with all our might. A man beating a woman to arouse himself or her would mean he raped her, subjugated her body, something that repelled us to the utmost degree. Yet we needed violence more than anything. Perhaps this need for violence—our need to feel the power of possession and a desire for an absolute loyalty to justify our lives, for the temptation to recreate some person in the world other than ourselves—perhaps this was what set Nayf in motion and set loose in his body an energy that resembled desire, yet was not, or not just.
203. So it was, that when she did not part her lips as they made contact with his mouth, which had suddenly grown wet, he did not hesitate to lick them then bite them harder and harder until he was barely stopping himself from drawing blood. And after her hands came to rest beneath his shoulders on the pretext of pushing him away—she wasn’t pushing him but pulling him in, planting her fingers through the back of the T-shirt and into his ribs—Nayf was astonished at himself for the savagery with which he bit Moon, cheek and neck, after lowering the dress from her shoulders and, pulling off her bra, likewise on her breast.
204. Her breast, in size and shape: a lemon; but the nipple is black and very large, a charcoal knuckle, and when his teeth encircle it at the root as though to nip it off—I mean the nipple—it’s owner will open wide her lips for the first time and her basil scent will blend with something between pepper and smoke and she will not make a sound. As though the whine that came from her before signified a resistance now broken in the face of a more profound and authentic pain; precisely as though the pain was (and leaving aside what we’d repeat among ourselves, Paulo, Nayf and I, that a person who’d lost pleasure or despaired of it must cling to pain as the only way to feel alive… As I write, in this moment, about myself, I believe that what keeps me alive, confronted by reports of parliamentary elections ongoing since November, is the pain of those twitching on the asphalt after inhaling gas, of those struck by bullets in their eyes, of those stampeding from the scourge of billyclubs and electric cables… The pain, that biting light in whose absence no one perceives a thing); as though the pain was, for Moon, the key to a locked door behind which lay her truth, which she would never confess except in jest or without conviction—all her lies were in the mirror—and which, consequently, she could not express with any sound whatever.
205. I see him slapping her seriously this time then, while circling her until he stands behind her as she kneels, twisting her arms behind her with one hand and with the other pulling off her underwear then lowering his clothes to enter her as though ramming a plank of wood into a wall cavity—all this in a single movement, like lightning—and he finds her wet and easy—as I was not to find her, at first—and leans over her back all overlain with gleaming chestnut hair to breathe in the smoke and pepper and search for a trace of basil, which draws further and further away amidst a throbbing pressure, only to return damply with her panting.
206. Then, as Nayf leans over Moon’s back, he will sink his hands into the curve of her flesh and yank her bunched hair, scour it, then insert his whole thumb into her anus to lift her sex towards him and will reach out his hand to mash her nipple between two fingers then fall to smacking her rump again. And with the resolve of a saint tortured by Romans on the shore of the Red Sea, she will keep holding back from crying out—not a sound except her faint pants broken, despite herself, by eruptions of a lowing or braying she struggles to cut off—until the moment that her small brown body quakes, spasm after spasm, having pulled her arms from his grasp and settled on all fours, writhing in what resembles a fit, a freshly-slaughtered panther, biting the green plush as he looms upright then kneels upon the sofa’s edge, his feet still on the living room floor.
207. The oblivious body. Which solicits a violence it did not know it wanted. Which offers up a sacrifice to something other than what constitutes living in Egyptian society. Far from ideas of sin and transgression, but far, too, from holding to any principle, no matter how straightforward and true the principle might be. The body, which I, Gear Knob, knew as boisterous, tyrannical for all its triviality, and in which I got to know The Crocodiles’ full stink, in one go; maybe Nayf intuited from her silence beneath this pain the truth of its moans. And forgot the lion. As he withdrew from Moon and left her bundled on the couch, still erect himself, yet to come—as he hurried to his bedroom to fetch two scarves and a fat candle in the shape of an apple—perhaps he forgot that a flesh and blood lion had been tormenting him for weeks.
New Year evokes two sets of connotations. Strategically positioned between Roman and Coptic Christmas, it is the occasion on which urban Muslims have most readily recognised the birth of Christ as a joyful aspect of their lives. As event and ritual, each solar transition — the breathless few moments before midnight notwithstanding — seems to hold the key to a deeper, older and more essential Egyptianness shared by all: it carries overtones of annual rebirth, the rain season, the kind of (agriculturally rooted) buoyancy that drives Nile Delta shopkeepers to pile up their wares outside of shops in a proud display of economic vitality. By free association, on the other hand, Western politics, the Palestinian plight, the rise of religious fundamentalism as an antidote to poverty, and the increasingly objectionable celebratory tendencies of the rich, the Westernised and the young: all these combine to deliver an altogether less pleasant package. But looking on, the unattached observer feels it is no less stimulating for being so.
Intentions aside, as you make the rounds of the Bab Al-Louq and Tal’at Harb cafés, you cannot control the free association of (nonobservant) ideas that might not seem very relevant to the occasion. Ancient Palestinian children were burned as offerings to the Canaanite fire god, Moloch. Their modern counterparts are undergoing similar treatment, it seems. But unless it is the new world order itself, nobody can tell who the Moloch behind the current massacres might be. In post-millennium Cairo, the homely aspect of New Year can only be encountered indoors. Cultural dissipation, (a)political purposelessness and moral chaos: on New Year’s eve, the streets throb with the workings of all three — a fire worship ritual that appears to go in tandem with the burning of children. And one cannot but notice the spread of an even more disturbing tendency: indifference. All through the day — and night — little shops here and there make a point of playing Qur’anic recitations, families go nonchalantly about their business, and civil employees lounge about in cafés the way they would on any given day. Even kull sana winta tayyib is not heard as frequently as it might be.
Early afternoon in Giza, the day after Eid: an enormous plethora of vehicles, heavy with post-Eid vacation and pre-celebration loads, gives the holiday atmosphere that has persisted since the end of Ramadan a busy and urgent edge. Where vehicles have been sparse and generally relaxed (many evacuate the city during Eid), a feeling of idle importance, as if in preparation for a grand affair, now overtakes the traffic. The occasional sight of a cassette recorder on the shoulder of an elaborately dressed, street-bound young man and the extensive reopening of establishments that were shut during Eid: so far, few outdoor developments are evocative of New Year at all. And early evening: the buying of presents continues in Doqqi and Mohandessin at a frenzied pace. Flower shops place a noticeably greater number of more alluring bunches on the sidewalks. Cinemas receive a fair share of Eid film lovers who bustle about the ticket booths, or recline on cars. The air has already cleared. And uncomfortably chilly as it might be, the atmosphere is profoundly refreshing. Physical exertion aside, it seems in harmony with the large-scale exuberance that is planned.
My taxi swerves aggressively, intent on overtaking a public bus that, monster-like and determined, edges closer and closer, gradually blocking the street. But before we make it across to the left-hand lane, an incredibly hardy fridge-like white vehicle booms past, the offensive ta-ra-la-li of contemporary urban folk trailing indifferently behind it. As we traverse Galaa Bridge, unobtrusively switching governorates, the party hats — taratir — begin to appear. Featherweight, ridiculous, covered in the kind of thin, colourful, crinkly-metal wrapping that goes into the making of bags of potato chips: downtown, they turn out to be New Year’s most abiding manifestation. As is usually the case on eventful nights, Qasr Al-Nil Bridge is swarming with curiously low-key young men floating about like so many menacing flotillas, and only occasionally interspersed with a lone dressed-up woman bristling with discomfort. Party pandemonium notwithstanding — and various, not always instantly recognisable narcotics have a significant part to play here — the sight persists all through Tahrir and beyond, into Tal’at Harb and the popular districts beyond Ataba. Back in the Qasr Al-Aini-Qasr Al-Nil complex, hotel parties are heavily protected. A state security officer motions silently, telling me to move off the sidewalk. A car stops suddenly, and the young driver sticks his head suggestively out of the window, though the object of his attention remains hidden.
As I run out of time, there seems to be nowhere to spend those precious few moments. In Bab Al-Louq, Qahwet Al-Horriya is all shisha and beer, but the festive spirit is crucially lacking, and the qahwa’s popularity seems to be more about the end of Ramadan than anything else. The same could be said of any number of downtown cafés. Even the Greek Club, the one venue that seems to be in with both intellectuals and everyday revellers, shuts its door to those who have no invitation to a prearranged party. And I retrace my footsteps to Huda Sha’rawi Street, noting a general, lazy quietness. On one side street off Qasr Al-Nil, a group of bored-looking young men are sharing a cigarette. As I pass, they shuffle uncomfortably, and we don’t know what to say to each other. “Kull sana winta tayyib,” one of them finally blurts out. I attempt a knowing smile. Further on, two men are hovering around a car parked diagonally across the street. Suddenly I realise it is midnight. “There you go,” one of them yells at the other. “It’s 12 o’clock, the new year has come already.” And almost instantly they get into the car, slam the door behind them and drive off into the night.
