Utopia (7 page)

My beloved cornea – and a dream of something beyond sex …

I saw everything collapse.

I warned them a thousand times, but they didn’t believe me; or they believed me, but didn’t care.

Sometimes I feel that Egyptians are a people who deserve what happens to them. A submissive people, lacking resolve, who bend before the first whip that lashes the air.

In the past, when I would philosophise, I told one of my friends, ‘Balfour gathered the Jews into one national homeland he had promised to them and, in this way, he rid the world of them.’

He ignorantly asked me who Balfour was, so I told him, ‘He was a man who gathered the Jews into one national homeland he had promised to them and, in this way, he rid the world of them.’

A look of wonder appeared on his face.

‘Whoa!’ he cried. ‘A man who gathered the Jews into one national homeland?’

‘I think there was another promise,’ I continued. ‘There was someone who gathered the good-for-nothings, the sluggish, the bums, and those lacking ambition from the ends of the earth into one national homeland – Egypt. That’s why you don’t find people lacking ambition in Japan. That’s why you don’t find good-for-nothings in Germany. That’s why you don’t find bums in Argentina. They’re all here, my friend!’

‘Whoa!’ he shouted in amazement, as he let out a puff of hashish smoke. ‘There’s someone who promised the—’

He didn’t finish what he was saying, because his head lolled forward on his chest and he passed out. A thread of saliva dribbled down his chin.

‘Those people are
you
, you dogs!’ I used to tell them. ‘Your situation has sunk so low that you’re now
eating
dogs! I warned you a thousand times! I told you about the theories of Malthus and Gamal Hamdan and the prophecies of Orwell and H.G. Wells. But all you do is get high on hashish and cheap liquor and pass out. Now I swing between sadness over your condition, which is my condition as well, and curses, because only now do you realise. My anger at you is like the anger of Old Testament prophets at their people, one of whom rejoiced and sang when the Babylonians besieged his city. He felt that his honour had finally been regained, even if it would be his last feeling of ecstasy. I curse you, you fools! I curse you!’

But what frightened me was that they didn’t care at all.

They were absolutely disinterested.

They looked for the next woman and the next rolled cigarette and the next meal and they didn’t realise what they’d come to.

I curse you, you fools! I curse you!

Safwat works in Utopia.

He dives into the sewage pipes to unblock them, although the sewage system there is good and carefully maintained. I should mention that those gated communities have their independent private services. We no longer have anything that could be called a sewage system. We make do. Most homes rely on ditches, and there is a cart that empties them out and then gets rid of the waste in a nearby location. Some people have no homes to begin with, so sewage pipes aren’t a problem for them.

It’s amusing to observe to what extent human necessities have shrunk. In the beginning, there were apartments with telephones, refrigerators, televisions and baths. So people were always complaining about the dog’s life they were leading, where they were forced to watch mindless TV programmes, and getting disruptions in electricity, phone lines and water. When you lose all of that, there’s no longer any source of complaint. So, you see, it’s a special kind of karma. When there’s no electricity, it never gets cut off.

So let the storm rage. Let the storm rage.

Safwat works in Utopia.

Safwat is a sewage-pipe diver in Utopia.

Safwat reads the newspaper and tells me, ‘They’re going to cancel customs duties on wood imported from the EU.’

Then he looks at me in confusion and asks me, ‘Is that beneficial? For whom?’

I give him a summary of my philosophy, which I’ve honed over the course of all these years, ‘I don’t understand what it means, but it’s detrimental to us, and that’s that. Any decision that is taken at any moment is against us.’

Safwat shows signs of understanding.

Safwat is in a relationship with a housemaid. Apparently, she’s been struck by the loss of her sense of smell, or by a cold. This housemaid would get phlogistine for him. Her employer isn’t careful with this expensive liquid, and leaves it lying everywhere. She would steal drops from the bottle to get it for Safwat, and he would bring it to me.

After that, I add some drops of lemon juice to the liquid to give it that smell and that cold sting when you put it on your skin. The centimetre of liquid turns into five centimetres, and I sell it at a sky-high price to our young guys. When they complain that they aren’t seeing the green flames, I tell them angrily, ‘Addiction has destroyed your nerve-endings, you sons of bitches! There’s nothing that can get you high any more, except the pangs of death itself!’

So they bite their tongues. My words have some truth to them.

Fraud? What does that mean? The best fraudster, without exception, is the one who adulterates drugs. This saintly man works for people’s benefit, in my opinion. He’s a social reformer raking in money!

Safwat works in Utopia.

I was waiting for him to come back from there.

From the minute those two got off the bus, I sensed they were strangers.

I didn’t know everyone in the neighbourhood, but I definitely knew misery and suffering. I knew hunger. I knew frailty. I’d encountered them quite a lot, so I’d come to recognise them with total ease from a distance, no matter how disguised they were.

Here I saw fake misery, suffering and hunger.

I saw fear, which was unusual. In our world you didn’t often see fear; instead, there was a kind of surrender to fate and hopelessness.

I stood watching them from a distance.

I saw amazement. I saw disgust. I saw loathing. I saw apprehensiveness.

All of these are alien feelings in my world. No one feels disgust among us. No one feels a sense of amazement. By age nine, any child has seen everything and been very hungry, and often has been raped three or four times; so you see on his face the look of someone who has seen it all, like an old, experienced prostitute.

These two aren’t from here, I told myself. They’re not from the Others.

You can cut my arm off if they aren’t from Utopia.

I saw the guy walking with the girl amid the crowds and the haze of sweat.

He stopped when he came to – to Somaya.

He was negotiating with her.

He had very bad taste. Somaya was the ugliest girl here: she was closer to a man in his prime, not to mention the fact that her uncle was el-Sirgani himself! El-Sirgani who had ripped out my cornea …

By an amazing coincidence, el-Sirgani had lost an eye – or a cornea – in a fight not too long ago. Our relationship was no longer as bad as it used to be, but we avoided confrontations. We only barked at each other again whenever we saw each other.

He wasn’t a thug. He was a pimp. It’s true that his body suggested the first profession, but let me assure you that he was a pimp. He didn’t sell his physical strength and force, rather he sold his women. The only goods he had for sale was Somaya, and of course, she didn’t sell very well.

That stupid boy had chosen Somaya, and therefore he was at the mercy of el-Sirgani. He could do anything. He could threaten him with a machete and take everything he had on him, or accuse him of attacking his family’s honour – like the actor Stephan Rosti in old movies – and force him to accept any one-sided condition.

The most important question here was: what was the role of the girl who was with him, and why wasn’t he satisfied with her? Was she his sister? Who makes a deal with a hooker in front of his sister? For that matter, who makes a deal with a hooker in front of any other woman?

In any case, the guy had taken Somaya with him and led her into the ruined buildings.

No one would pick a fight with him. She was protecting him. But if she screamed or called for help or something happened to her, then he’d be torn to shreds. The guys in the ruined building sniffing glue would tear him apart until her uncle arrived to finish the job of flaying him alive.

Curiosity to know more got the better of me, so I forgot all about Safwat and what he had on him, and I started making my way into the middle of the ruined buildings, looking for Somaya and her client.

The girl who could be his sister would probably run into some problems. I couldn’t stand seeing a girl in a trouble, because it reminded me of Safiya.

I thought I could rescue her if that happened.

I wasn’t strong, but I was popular. I was also part of Abd el-Zahir’s gang, so I was under his protection. Any attack on me was an attack on him – that wasn’t a trivial matter.

Standing there in the dark, I was suddenly surprised by a strange sight. The guy landed a karate-chop on Somaya’s neck, and she crumpled to the ground like a heavy sack. He didn’t want her for sex. He wanted to hurt her, for some reason that I didn’t understand.

Or maybe I did understand!

But he was really stupid. El-Sirgani never let Somaya out of his sight and, consequently, there had to be someone watching her from a distance to guarantee that she wouldn’t escape or take more money from the client. So I knew that the news of this had reached el-Sirgani with lightning speed.

Ten young guys raced in the dark. They leaped over the rubble of collapsed walls, bricks and piles of rubbish. They leaped over rocks. They leaped right into the scene the moment it happened.

They surrounded the guy and his girl, while Somaya lay in a heap on the ground, unaware of what was going on.

Then Suka shouted in his rough, guttural voice, ‘They aren’t like us! They’re from Utopia!’

The hatred in their eyes was clear. They probably had the same look in their eyes when they stormed the Bastille. They were one and the same. The rabble has a standardised type and appearance, regardless of the difference in countries and languages. In their hands flashed blades that weren’t part of knives: instead, they were parts of car frames that had been turned into murder weapons. There was a water pipe or two like in
Gangs of New York
.

Germinal trembled and clung to me. We wouldn’t get out of this.

I felt a hand roughly searching through my pocket, then it pulled out my mobile phone.

Their eyes all turned to the body lying on the ground. The message was entirely clear, and they understood it, ‘They kidnap any one of us they find, take them back for their entertainment, then kill them!’

I understood that the first punch would open up the floodgates, after which punches would come raining down.

Only who would start it? Goodbye, Germinal. In spite of
everything, life was boring. Maybe ridding ourselves of it was a kind of change.

‘Don’t hurt them, guys. They’re innocent. I saw the girl fall: no one touched her.’

It was one of them, speaking with determination. I couldn’t make out his features, because my eye was looking at the situation as a whole, not at individuals.

‘I saw him hit her, Gaber,’ one of them said.

‘You didn’t see anything, you son of a …’ retorted my mysterious rescuer, who apparently was called Gaber. ‘The glue you’ve been sniffing has killed off your brain and blinded you.’

Then he whispered in my ear, ‘Got any phlogistine on you?’

I hesitated.

‘Either that, or you’ll be seeing your ears on the ground in a second!’ he hissed.

I reached my hand into my sock and pulled out a small bottle resembling an ampoule that had been stuck to my ankle with tape. He snatched it from me and waved it before their eyes. ‘Do you know what this is? Phlogistine! Anyone who hasn’t yet tried it should know that it’s totally different from glue-sniffing and pot and Parkinol pills. Take it and try some. One drop on your forearm. Don’t do too much of it, dumbasses: I’ve seen someone die from it in seconds because he put two drops on.’

They all seemed to know what he was talking about.

Instantly they forgot all about revenge, pounced on the ampoule, and started calling each other filthy names. Suddenly we no longer existed.

One of them tried to run with the ampoule, but another one stuck his leg out in his path and he fell. He leaped on the
ampoule and wrenched it away, only to have someone else stick his finger in his eye. At that, another one pounced, biting the rear end of the one who had done the eye-poking. Meanwhile, the one who had fallen had got up on his feet and kicked the face of the one who was biting the other’s behind. A mass of bodies wrestled, and you couldn’t tell where one of them began and the other one ended. Who was losing and who was winning?

None of them asked me how I’d got hold of that amount. You’d have to try some before you’d understand: faced with phlogistine, only idiots stop to ask where it comes from.

If they’d stopped for a moment, they’d have realised that the fact that I had phlogistine on me confirmed their suspicions about me.

Gaber shouted at the group, which was no longer hearing or seeing, ‘They’re thieves! They stole this phlogistine from those Utopia bastards!’

With that, it was as if he was giving us a get-out-of-jail-free card!

At that point, I saw the giant pimp approaching from a distance, brandishing his machete, sending imaginary heads flying as he launched a barrage of curses.

He was coming towards us, foaming and frothing at the mouth, and then, before he could say anything, the young guy shouted, ‘Phlogistine, el-Sirgani! Flog! Flog!’

The man didn’t slow down, but altered his trajectory; he had been heading directly towards me, now he rushed towards the brawlers. I didn’t understand what happened, but I was certain that he brought his machete down on them. These people seem to have a very quick grasp of things and their hesitation
is nonexistent. They’re the hawk that doesn’t have time to understand what is taking place, but attacks first and understands later.

The young guy, our rescuer, furtively gave us a signal to take off, so we ran behind him.