The Devil Is a Black Dog (22 page)

“Now, can I invite you for a drink?” I said.

“I’d rather just go to my place.”

She took my hand, climbed to one step above me, and kissed my lips. I could smell the tear gas on her skin. We went back to the bar together to get my stuff. Sanders was already stupidly drunk. He looked at me and in a gurgling voice said, “Watch out. That one’s crazy.”

Sahra lived in a three-room apartment in Heliopolis. “Do it so it hurts,” she said as we undressed. We didn’t shower; we simply stripped ourselves of our clothing and fell all over each other on her Ikea bed. Her eyes flashed when I wrapped my hands around her neck. I pinned her down on the bed and entered her.

Afterward we lay wordlessly next to each other.

I was staring at a picture on the wall, a 2009 World Press Photo winner, showing a Palestinian woman carrying the body of a dead child. The shot was taken with a 55 mm lens, the photographer standing opposite her.

“Did you take that?” I asked, indicating the picture. Her neck was still red from my grasp.

“Yes,” she said and took hold of my outstretched hand. She was staring at the ring on my finger.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then why the ring? You don’t have to lie.”

“It’s not a lie. I’m not married.”

“Then why the ring?”

“It’s stuck to my finger. I can’t take it off anymore. I was married, though.”

“What happened?”

“She thought I was getting in the way of her career as a writer.”

“When was this?”

“Last year. And she took our child.”

“And? Did you love her?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t it bother you to wear the ring, then?”

“It does; I just can’t take it off.”

She looked at the ring on my finger for a while, then said, “Why don’t you cut it off?”

“Because I like my finger.”

We fell silent again. I wasn’t in the mood to tell her that the mother of my child had slept with my enemies at every opportunity, that she seemed to take great joy in my destruction. I didn’t want to tell her how my heart had stopped in Arish from all the tranquilizers I’d taken, or how once I hadn’t slept for a week, 165 hours, to be exact. I didn’t want her to know that my ex was
blackmailing me with parental visitations, and how, in the end, you could do anything to another person with no consequences. It had nothing to do with her.

“And, you, what’s your story?” I asked. It occurred to me that anybody over the age of thirty must have one. “Just screwing around?”

“Mine died in Iraq.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He went and got himself shot.”

“Was he in the press?”

“Yes.”

“Did you love him?”

“I was pregnant when he died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be. I got rid of it.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t deliver babies to dead people.”

She got up and went to the bathroom. I could hear her turn on the shower. I looked at my watch; it was 1
AM
. I rose from the bed and began to dress.

I found her in the hall, wrapped in a white towel.

“If you want to sleep here, I can make up the couch.”

“Just a blanket is fine. Thanks.”

She stepped over to a closet, took out a light blue blanket, and put it into my hands.

“Lock the door on your way out when you leave.”

In the shower, I used her lavender body gel, and then went to bed. I couldn’t sleep, however. I kept looking at the photos on the wall in the dim light of the room. They were all hers, and they all took place in the heat of battle. She had been to every one of those places in the last seven years, and in each place she had been on the front line of an armed conflict. It suddenly came to me that, if indications were true, other people also had shitty lives.

I checked my phone. My editor needed the pictures from the night before. I sent him an email and headed out.

Glass from the smashed storefront windows crunched under my feet along Talat Harb Street. I felt queasy. I thought I might walk down Mohamed Mahmoud Street, snap a few shots of the burning barricades, and then, while I was there, go have a drink. Sanders was already in Alexandria shooting the ruckus there, so I was quite alone.

A huge crowd had already gathered on Tahrir Square. A bearded man in a robe stood at the square’s opening, toweling off his face.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“We are keeping them busy so they can’t enter the square.”

“How many are injured?”

“I don’t know, but the dead are in the Omar Makram Mosque. They are there, and there are more than a few.”

“Thanks.”

“Allah Karim.”

The air was thick with tear gas and the smoke from burning trash. I took my camera from its case, set it to the night photography mode, and headed down Mohamed Mahmoud Street. The Central Security Forces had cut the power to the entire district. On both sides of the street the trash bins and barricades were ablaze; the demonstrators had lit them to keep the tear gas attacks at bay and to see movement in the night.

An ambulance tried to cut through the heaving crowd, but the sirens couldn’t be heard above the sounds of shotguns and fighting.

On the nearby streets the fighting continued. I saw lit Molotov cocktails in the hands of the surging crowd, but there wasn’t enough light to get photos of them. A tear gas grenade cut through the air, emitting a thick white wake of smoke, and landed a few yards from where I was standing. I put my gas mask on. It
wasn’t the best equipment; I had bought it for twenty-five dollars from a street vendor. It was meant for industrial use, not for a tear gas attack. Still, it worked.

A second grenade hit the ground, bounced along the cement, and began to smoke. Another followed, then a fourth. A panicked escape ensued. I clutched my camera and began to shoot, flattening myself against the wall so I wouldn’t get carried along with the crowd.

I didn’t hear the bang of the rifle, didn’t see the barrel flash; I just felt the blow. My head hit the cement. The gas mask was knocked off, and my lungs filled. I was suddenly overcome with calm, the likes of which I hadn’t felt since my divorce. As the world around me went dark, the thought entered my mind that everything had come to an end. It had come to an end on a moonless Middle Eastern night, doing away with those questions of who I was and what I was doing here; doing away with the senseless quest for money, and that money’s even more senseless spending.

I have no idea how long I was out. When I came to, I felt hands upon me.

“He is wearing a vest,” said somebody in Arabic.

I opened my eyes. Sahra Gamal was standing over me with two of the demonstrators.

“You OK?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. It hurt to speak.

“You were shot. Lucky thing you had a vest on.”

“Yes,” I said, and sat up. My side hurt terribly, and blood was dripping from my forehead into my eye.

“Is there somebody we should contact?”

“No, nobody.”

“Your paper?”

“I’m freelance.”

“Can you stand?”

“I think so.”

I used Sahra to hold me up as I hobbled all the way to Qasr al-Nil Bridge. From there we got a taxi.

“Here, take this,” she said once we were in the apartment.

“What is it?”

“A painkiller.”

I swallowed the pill. We were standing in the bedroom again. Sahra unbuttoned my shirt, put her hand against my black Kevlar vest, and then ran her fingers all along my side.

“They shot you here.”

“Yes.”

Her hand found the Velcro, then ripped it loose and took the vest off me. The whole spectrum of the rainbow could be seen on my side.

“Does it hurt when you inhale?”

“Yes.”

“You probably broke a rib. Lean back.”

I leaned back. She took off my boots, my socks, then unbuttoned my belt and pulled my pants off. After she finished, she also began to undress, and then reclined next to me on the bed. Now, for the first time, I took in her entire body. I’d been with lots of women since my divorce, but I never examined the whole of their naked bodies. I simply wasn’t interested. I only wanted them to satisfy my needs, nothing more. I wouldn’t have used them if I had come to know their bodies’ flaws. A flaw personalized them.

Sahra’s body was marred by scar tissue and cuts, but it was still beautiful. I gazed at her brown skin for a while, the little black nipples. On the inner part of her right hand was tattooed in black letters,
Die Toten Reiten Schnell.
It was a new tattoo; it couldn’t have been more than a year old, as there was no fading.

“What does it mean?” I asked, running a finger over it.

“To ride fast like the dead. It’s German.”

“I understand that, but why did you have it inked there?”

“To remind myself.”

“Of what?”

“That the dead don’t hold back anything, because the worst has already happened to them. Their lives were taken.”

“And you think you are dead?”

“I don’t think I lived past what happened to me. I have no life outside my work, no purpose, no desire. I am like the dead. With just a memory of who I was.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“No, it’s not. I know you know what I’m talking about. You also died; I saw it in your eyes.”

“We’ve both done some pretty lively things. Together, for example.”

“It’s a way to pass the time.”

“You want to die?”

“No. It just doesn’t matter if I die. Or you, for that matter. You don’t have a family you need to go home to, or even a wife anymore. You don’t have anything. Just your camera and your work. You’re already dead; you just haven’t realized it yet.”

“I’m tired,” I said.

“From the pill.”

“From everything. Can I sleep here?”

“Yes.”

“I snore when I dream.”

“I cry.”

“No problem,” I said, and took her in my arms.

I woke up from the ache in my side. Sahra was still asleep. She was tucked in up to the neck; you could see only her hair on the pillow. The clock read 8
AM
. I climbed from the bed, collected my clothing from the floor, and started toward the bathroom. I stopped in front of the foyer mirror and had a look at my side: it was black, but in happier news, the wound on my head didn’t appear too bad and I didn’t feel faint. I most likely hadn’t gotten a concussion.

I used Sahra’s shower gel as I washed. By the time I finished, she had woken and was standing undressed in the kitchen.

“Want a coffee?”

“Sure.”

“How’s your side?”

“It hurts.”

“You should go to a doctor.”

“Not a chance. There’s a revolution on.”

She smiled and placed a mug of coffee in front of me, then turned. She stepped up to the fridge, took out the butter, and with her back still to me, began to spread some on a slice of bread. I stared, all the while thinking that this was a preposterously beautiful woman.

“Look, you know we can meet like normal people do sometime,” I said. “For example, we could go to a restaurant. We could eat like normal people, and I could try to get you drunk enough to sleep with me.”

“I’ll gladly sleep with you again. No need for fireworks.”

“You’re not getting it. Can’t we go somewhere, anywhere, and do something like regular people?”

“That’s daft. There’s no point. There is no point in romance.”

“I’m still alive. You should give it a try.”

She turned on the TV. The Al Jazeera newscaster’s British-accented voice filled the kitchen. It was streaming from the city center, showing violent fighting everywhere.

“Let’s think about getting to work,” said Sahra. “Get your stuff together.”

They had put the injured on prayer rugs. In the mosque’s haze, the demonstrators were placing lamps between the rows of bodies. The doctors circulated among them like angels in white coats. They bent down, checked pulses, examined wounds, and gave
injections. But the real work took place in a space cordoned off by curtains: that’s where the serious cases were taken. Burn victims and those with shattered bones howled from pain, drowning out the sound of the Koran recitation coming from a speaker, whose voice at times rose loud enough to accompany the sound of the sick, giving the holy text an altogether more moving recitation. I photographed the wounded. I felt heavily medicated, but at least my side didn’t hurt.

I didn’t see Sahra for the next three days. I tried to drive her from my thoughts and concentrate on work instead. After work I dutifully went home and uploaded my photos. By night I surfed the Web. I did a search for her there but found only a single photo. In the picture she was locked in an embrace with a man somewhere that looked like the Congo. Both were smiling at the camera. It dawned on me that that was what she was like before.

It’s possible she is right
, I thought.

I was shooting a quick series while lying on the ground when my cell phone rang. It was Sanders.

“I heard you were shot, man.”

“You heard right.”

“But you’re okay?”

“Peachy.”

“Listen, remember that freaky German chick?”

“Yeah.”

“Well she’s been looking for you. I gave her your number. I hope that’s not a problem.”

“No.”

“Did you bang her?”

“Yeah.”

“Good work. We’ll drink to it later. I’ll be gone for a couple of days. So when I come back from Port Said.”

“OK.”

I put the phone away. I checked my photos, and then left the mosque.

Back home, I was sitting on the roof, uploading photos to the Internet. The FTP server was bloody slow, so I passed the time playing music and smoking.

At first I didn’t hear the sound of the phone over the speakers. It must have been ringing for minutes before I picked it up.

“It’s Sahra,” came the voice over the line.

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to ask whether you have a 50 mm lens.”

“Yeah, I’ve got one.”

“Can I borrow it?”

“Of course. Where should we meet?”

“The restaurant at the Hilton.”

“Right. What time?”

“Nine. Just don’t be late; I want to eat too. I’ll come from work, as I need a few nighttime pictures.”