The Devil Is a Black Dog (21 page)

“OK,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll take you to a ghost rider.”

We left the house at noon. Abed had to make several calls to figure out where a ghost rider lived who would be willing to see us. No sooner did he find one than we were off. The desert was blindingly white; before our eyes the ultramarine sky melted into the horizon.

We had been driving for an hour before Abed spoke.

“You know you will have to pay him.”

“I do. Do you know the man?”

“No. My nephew told me how to find him. He’s called Ahmed Ustazi.”

“OK.”

“What is it you want?”

“To drive away the devil.”

“Anything more concrete?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll see what he recommends.”

We let it drop. A few minutes later a row of palm huts appeared in the distance. When we pulled up, all the village’s children were standing along the road, gaping at the car. Abed slowed to a stop and greeted them.

“Peace be upon you. Where can we find Ahmed Ustazi’s tent?”

The kids scattered at the mention of the ghost rider’s name. We started off toward the center of the village.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” I asked Abed.

“I’m sure.”

We were at the outer huts, when we noticed an old woman.

Abed, leaning his crutch up against a hut, asked her where the ghost rider lived; she pointed to the distance. A brown tent stood almost half a mile away.

As we approached the tent, my nose caught the smell of carrion. Abed went into the tent first; I followed. For a few minutes I couldn’t see anything in the dimly lit space, then, as my eyes adjusted, I was able make out the interior.

From the tent’s ceiling the rotting carcasses of kestrels, their wings spread wide, hung on plastic cords, flies buzzing around them.

Under the kestrels stood a beat-up writing table covered with bowls and trash. A forty-something man in a jellabiya sat in front of the table in a woven chair. His face was grubby, and he was missing an eye.

“Peace be upon you,” he said. That was the most I understood of his Bedouin dialect. We approached the table, then Abed explained the situation, waving his hands for emphasis. The man turned toward me and said something I couldn’t understand.

“He said he doesn’t know a curse that can drive away the devil,” Abed translated, then added, “But he does know one to use if you can’t rest, if you never feel satisfied and can’t love anybody, not even yourself.”

“That will work,” I said. Right then, I felt that the tent was dissolving, me along with it. I teetered, and then reached into my pocket, where I kept a bottle. I took a few swigs of the lukewarm mineral water.

Abed looked at me with worry. Again, the ghost rider spoke.

“He said that this would be the strongest knot.”

“OK.”

“You will need something of your wife’s. Do you have anything from her?”

“A boy,” I said, and leaned on the table for support. Abed translated. The ghost rider picked up a rusty scalpel from the table. Before I had time to realize it, he’d made a two-inch-long cut on my hand. It was deep, and blood began to immediately flow from the wound. From under the trash on the table, he produced a blue plastic dish. He held my hand over the dish, so my cut could drip into it. He scattered bird feathers and sand in the blood, then began to chant.

Because of my sleeplessness, the tent again began to spin, only that this time I didn’t lose my balance. I gazed at the ghost rider, who was bending over my hand, mumbling something; I watched my blood, how it rhythmically dripped into the plastic dish.

A cell phone sounded. It started quietly, but became increasingly loud, until the preinstalled Nokia ringtone filled the tent. The ghost rider stood upright, then reached into the pocket
of his jellabiya, took out the phone, and began to talk. He spoke in a Cairo accent, which I understood perfectly. The topic of conversation was a car. I gathered that he was selling it and a potential buyer was on the line. Abed and I looked at each other questioningly, but the ghost rider wasn’t in the least bit embarrassed.

The man described the car’s attributes at length: the tires and condition of the rims, as well as the battery, which he had changed just a few weeks ago. When he finished the conversation he carefully put the phone back in his pocket, looked at me and my bleeding hand, and said only this:

“We’re alright.”

Abed translated, though it wasn’t necessary. This, I already understood. I also well understood the next sentence:

“That will be a hundred dollars.”

I reached into the pocket of my leather jacket, took out my last hundred-dollar bill, and pressed it into the man’s hand. I then left the tent. Abed followed.

I took my scarf from my neck and wrapped it around my hand, then sat holding it in the car.

We pulled away quickly, soon leaving the village behind. We gazed at the desert that rushed past and the hills in the distance.

For a while we sat in silence, then the Bedouin said, “You know, you can still shoot her.” We then agreed that although the wound on my hand wasn’t too serious, it would be a good idea if we stopped in Arish to pick up some disinfectant.

—Gottfried August Bürger, “Lenore”
^*

S
he wrote to say she wasn’t going to let me see the child. I read the email through once more, then thought it would be a good time to put on my jacket and go out into the fighting on the street. It would be better than writing back and spending the rest of the night staring into the monitor, waiting for a response. I wasn’t in the mood to tell her for the thousandth time not to blackmail me with my own child.

Out on the street they were fighting for peace. Cairo was burning. The demonstrators attacked the Interior Ministry with sticks and stones. The police had begun firing into the crowds. Typically it pleases me when there is fighting, as it gives me work with which to occupy myself.

I’d seen four wars in the year that passed since she took the child. I had no idea how much morphine I would consume, how many barroom brawls and dogfights I’d see, how many Sudanese whores I would fuck in backstreet brothels before the madness and rage would be driven from me. But what was left was aimlessness; I didn’t know how to move forward. If I didn’t keep myself occupied, I’d just sit there gazing at my navel for days or even weeks. On that night, as on many nights, I preferred to put on my coat, check my camera, and grab a taxi.

The driver didn’t want to take me to Tahrir Square, so I had to walk across Qasr al-Nil Bridge, where a large crowd had gathered, gaping dumbfounded at the oily black smoke rising from the city center. An armored personnel carrier was in flames by the entrance to the square. Wide red stains darkened the cement, but the bodies were nowhere to be seen. The demonstrators must have taken them to a nearby mosque. I imagined they’d been laid out on the mosque’s synthetic green prayer carpets and wrapped in white blankets, which the blood would slowly seep through. I had seen this before, at the outbreak of the uprising. The bodies began to reek within an hour, and the blood flowed from them as though they were still living.

The shards of a broken windshield crunched under my shoes as I got closer to the fire. I took a picture of a young hooded man. He was shouting “Murderers, murderers!” at the black-clad riot police, spittle flying from his mouth.

The crowd that had assembled by the square’s entrance was throwing rocks at the riot police. I snapped five or so pictures before the demonstrators surged. Smoke grenades sliced through the air above, white trails in their wake. The police line broke, and eight men stepped forward and began to fire with shotguns. Those who took the shots in the front line fell. From the rear rows people ran clutching their faces, blood running between their fingers. From twenty meters, a shotgun blast is no longer lethal, but it can still take out an eye. Everybody began to flee. I ran with the crowd all the way to the bridge.

The escape didn’t last long—just until we were out of the guns’ range. The police closed off their formation, then retreated to the front of Qasr al-Ayni Street. I had accidentally hit somebody with a camera lens during the surge, and was forced to stop and check that the glass hadn’t shifted; only afterward did I start heading back with the demonstrators, who were again throwing stones. I shot a series of two young boys, Molotov cocktails in their hands, charging toward the police.

Right then I saw Sahra Gamal. She was kneeling at Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a Nikon D5 in her hand. We knew each other—she’d been there during the recent conflicts in Libya and Gaza; she was a brave woman, one of the bravest I’d known. Sahra, who had duel German and Egyptian citizenship, worked for
Der Spiegel.
She never turned down an assignment, and had seen some of the fiercest action around. So it was no surprise to see her there on one knee, in a scarf, her breasts bound with cloth. For the first time, it struck me what a beautiful woman she was. I went and stood beside her.

“Let’s get a drink after the next barrage,” I said. Before she could answer, a fresh attack came and the fleeing crowd separated us.

It had grown dark. The streetlights on Tahrir Square had been turned on. In front of the Mugamma building where volunteer doctors were assembling tents, the wounded lay moaning on the muddy, blood-caked mats; you could see their breath in the air. The cold came suddenly. The sun had almost completely disappeared from the horizon, and the temperature dropped to around five degrees. In many places across the square, fires blazed. On Mohamed Mahmoud Street there was still fighting, and the barricades had been set alight.

David Sanders, an American photojournalist, called to see where I was, and showed up later amid the fighting. We had worked alongside one another several times in the past. He was with Reuters, so we didn’t step on each other’s toes. It’s good to have somebody around who knows you. In a worst-case scenario he can lie and deliver some wise dying words to your family, or embellish an otherwise pointless death with some heroic details.

We emerged from Mohamed Mahmoud Street, our faces burning from tear gas and our shoes making a wet, smacking sound against the pavement from the mixture of oil and mud. My leather jacket was speckled with buckshot holes, and Sanders’s old Soviet coat hadn’t fared much better. I took my gas mask from my face, sat on a bench, and lit a cigarette. Sanders—who was tall, black-haired, and Jewish—sat next to me, dropping his 5D in his lap. Dirt outlined the place where his mask had been.

“It’s getting dark,” he said.

“Yeah, we’re fucked for more pictures.”

“Right. How many did you get?”

He took the cigarette from my hand and had a drag. I looked at the indicator.

“Three hundred and forty-eight.”

“I got around that many as well. It’s enough.”

“My face is burning.”

“So is mine. Let’s grab a drink.”

“Where?”

“Well, I’m not about to cross over to Zamalek. So here at the Lotus.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

I felt dizzy from the gas and my limbs were heavy. Sanders was also out of it; we could barely drag ourselves along. The Lotus stood at the head of Talaat Harb Street. It was one of the few places that held a license to sell alcohol. Nobody ever actually stayed there; the mattresses had bedbugs, the sheets were grimy, and there was never any hot water.

To get to the bar, you had to ring a bell on the wall, signaling the headwaiter, who would send the elevator down. Even as we ascended we could hear the thrum from the street. As soon as we stepped from the elevator, our faces were hit with cigarette smoke. Every table was crowded with journalists; practically the entire international media was there. Alcohol hinders the absorption of tear gas into the bloodstream, and it eases the poison’s effects. Everybody there was guzzling drink after drink.

I peeled myself from my equipment and sat at the bar.

“What will the gentlemen be having?” the headwaiter asked.

“
Itnēn
Auld Stag,
min fadlik.
”

He nodded, grabbed two dusty water glasses from the shelf, rinsed them out, then took some ice from a bucket.

“Single or double?” he asked, bottle in hand.

“Double,” we said simultaneously.

He poured and we each downed ours in a gulp.

“Another?”

I nodded yes. I was drinking on an empty stomach; I could feel the alcohol run up my spine.

“What’s the score?” asked Sanders and staggered over to the TV, which was showing Mohamed Mahmoud Street. In the dark only the flaming barricades and the flashes from the police rifles could be seen. Al Jazeera was broadcasting live from one of the apartments on the square.

“Thirteen dead, more than three hundred wounded,” said the headwaiter, placing the next round in front of us. “Though the Ministry of Health hasn’t confirmed that yet.”

“Well, at least it wasn’t us,” said Sanders.

We drank to the fact that we had gotten through the day alive, that we were OK. We were still alive to file one more story, to spend another day in a foreign country with foreign inhabitants, in the middle of a foreign conflict.

“I’m going to wash my face,” I said and headed toward the restroom on the floor below; a grimy rug covered the steps that led there. Halfway down I came face to face with Sahra Gamal. She had already taken off her scarf, her black hair falling to her shoulders. Her face was damp with water.