Utopia (11 page)

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the last census to be held, there were thirty-five million Egyptians living below the poverty line. Unemployment, which reached its highest global levels, stood at ten million. Note that 78 percent of those committing rape were unemployed: that is to say, the crime of rape is really a crime by an entire class of society. Not to mention, of course, the dissolution of the middle class that, in any society, plays the role of graphite rods in nuclear reactors: they slow down the reaction and, if it weren’t for them, the reactor would explode. A society without a middle class is a society primed for explosion.

That is exactly what happened, but the explosion didn’t do away with the wealthy class. It decimated what remained of the middle class, and turned society into two poles and two peoples.

Only the wealthy class realised that there was no life for it unless it became completely isolated, following the same logic behind medieval castles, when rulers would hold decadent parties while pestilence decimated the sea of poverty outside.
The Masque
of the Red Death
– where did I read a story with that title, and when? And who wrote it? I don’t remember…

I’ve read a whole lot. I’ve read everything. Until the letters dissolved into each other, and until I ended up not belonging to the Others and not belonging to Utopia. In every situation, I am strange, different, peculiar, foolish, uncomfortable and unintegrated.

Was any one of them capable of preventing this?

I don’t know. I’m not an economist or a politician. Besides, I haven’t received a formal education, since I enrolled at the free university of life.

But there had been some terrifying indicators, and everyone should have taken notice of them. When you smell smoke and you don’t warn the people around you, then in some way you’ve participated in lighting the fire.

When I look over the newspapers of the first decade of the century, I smell a whole lot of smoke. The newspaper pages reek of smoke. So why didn’t anyone do anything?

Because everyone colluded against us.

Everyone colluded against me.

One day, I will die, and I’ll come back to haunt them in the guise of a demon or a ghost, and I’ll make their lives hell. None of them will be safe, no matter how much they try to hide from me.

But I won’t kill these two.

The guy from Utopia was sitting down, not doing anything.

‘You’re here eating my food and sleeping under my roof,’ I said to him in an imperious tone. ‘So you have to try to earn your daily bread.’

He gave me a challenging look. I could tell he wanted to tear me apart, but he was completely at my mercy. That’s why he was
staying silent. If he possessed one respectable quality, it was intelligence.

‘We’ve got money,’ he told me. ‘Is that what you want?’

‘I don’t want any of your money,’ I told him in disgust. ‘I want you to help me.’

There was a lot of work in the network of subway tunnels, but I wouldn’t tell him anything about it. If these two managed to return to their world, I didn’t want to find the authorities completely blocking up the subway system with concrete. That would mean we would be choked off.

That network was my private world: I knew every inch of it, and I was a king down there.

I handed Safiya a bottle containing a mixture of cough medicine and Parkinol with opium, and whispered, ‘As I told you, don’t use a lot of it, and don’t try it yourself.’

I left the shack with the guy, walking among tons of refuse and sewage, among the young men who fight and hurl rubbish at each other. We walked for about fifteen minutes through this ruined city, and we finally reached El-Moallem Taha Square, which is fenced in. At the gate we were met by an enforcer whose job is not wholly clear to me. All he usually does is intimidate people as they arrive.

He handed a knife to each of us. Within was an expanse of ground almost the size of a small city square, and there were around fifty people like us, constantly working.

There was a pile of dead chickens in the corner. A pile almost five metres tall. There was no smell because they’d died that day on some farm outside Cairo.

At the second pile stood a group of women plucking feathers. There were vats of hot water with steam rising from them. You
had to be careful in this section because of the risk of getting burned.

The third pile of bare chicken carcasses rose high. It grew higher with each moment. If people were chickens, then this place would be a mass grave.

‘Clean or de-bone?’ I asked the guy from Utopia, as I pulled out my knife.

He looked at me in confusion, his face contorted with disgust, so I explained, ‘Are you going to cut the stomach and pull out the innards, or are you going to strip the bones from the meat?’

‘I can’t do either.’

I looked around me to make sure no one would hear me. ‘No one lives here without working. Filthy work. Taboo work. Illegal work. It is what it is. The important thing is that you work. I won’t spend a single pound on you from now on.’

‘You’re talking about spending money on me as if we’re sleeping in a palace and bathing in rosewater and eating caviar,’ he said angrily. ‘How much do those sour beans and our sleeping in a chicken coop cost you?’

‘Quiet!’ I raised my finger to my lips in warning. ‘If they heard that spoiled tone of yours and the way you pronounce your letters, they’d skin you instead of the chickens. You’re giving yourself away all the time!’

He shook his head with the stubbornness of a mule, and then headed to the nearby pile where four people were working: the ‘de-boning’ pile. They placed entire chickens on a smooth stone and, with their knives, tore the meat from the bones. Then they tossed the meat on a neighbouring pile and the bones on another pile.

It was an assembly line that would have delighted Mr Henry
Ford, whose genius in inventing automobile assembly lines in the last century was endlessly praised.

‘Here,’ I told him as I grabbed the first chicken and cut open its stomach. ‘When we’re done, we’ll go out the back door and we’ll get our wages. About one chicken for each of us. Where do you think we get meat? This party isn’t held every day. There are days when they have enough people, and we aren’t allowed to work at all.’

‘Dead chickens?’ he asked in disgust.

I let out an ugly snort and replied, ‘Do you people really care about animal slaughter according to Islamic law, you fraud?’

Then I told myself they probably do care. They are very particular about slaughtering chickens but they aren’t so particular about slaughtering us. They don’t invoke God’s name over us, and they don’t expertly cut the jugular vein.

He began working in misery, disgust, wretchedness, grumpiness, exasperation and resentment.

Nothing wrong with that! Some kinds of revenge don’t include murder, but in spite of that, they are deliciously pleasant.

He cut himself a thousand times, and the blood that covered his hand became a mix of chicken blood and his own. Let him experience it. Let him learn. Let him suffer.

There was a world-famous actor called Charlie Chaplin. I know him, but I’m not sure you do. That artist made his fame by showing his poor, downtrodden hero triumph over the rich and the police. He once said, ‘People like to see the rich get the worst of things. The reason is that nine-tenths of the people in the world are poor, and secretly resent the wealth of the other tenth.’

More than once, the guy slowed his pace, so I warned him,
‘They’re watching. If they see you loafing about, they would kick you out without a second glance, and you won’t get anything.’

So we kept working for around an hour. But I wasn’t prepared to spend the whole day here.

When it grew more crowded, and the faces multiplied, I could no longer see the guy from Utopia.

Maybe he was there beside me, but he was immersed in blood and sweat, so not a trace of him appeared.

Only at that point could I hurry to the back door to the square. Khalil was standing by it as usual. He looked at me in astonishment, saying, ‘Again? I can’t protect you for ever.’

‘But you do,’ I said, as I handed him the bloody knife, which you’re never allowed to take back to your house. ‘It’s only a half-hour.’

‘Flog.’

‘No problem. I’m good for it.’

So he cleared the way for me to pass. He knows I will come back the very same way, and he will let me come in and work some time before I get my full wages. He stands here to prevent this exact thing.

This time, I ran, so I reached my house within fifteen minutes. I only needed ten minutes and then I’d be back in another fifteen minutes.

Safiya was inside waiting for me.

I quickly washed the traces of chicken blood from my face and hands. I can stand dirt, but I can never stand blood.

The girl from Utopia had passed out, of course, because of the mix of cough medicine and Parkinol with opium that Safiya had given her to drink from the bottle. No one can withstand this abominable cocktail, unless he has already tried it at least five times before. She wasn’t a lifeless corpse, since I didn’t want to have sex with a dead body, but she was in a state of complete, submissive stupor.

Loyal Safiya had done as I ordered. She’d washed the girl’s dirty face and her filthy feet, which had begun to look like our women’s feet.

‘Thank you, Safiya,’ I told her. ‘And now, get out of here. I won’t take more than ten minutes.’

She ran her fingers over the girl’s soft hair and said, ‘Take your time. Her skin is smooth like children’s skin. You deserve to enjoy yourself, poor thing. You need clean hair and smooth skin. Enjoy yourself. Let her beauty wash away the filth of your soul.’

The strange thing is that she was touched on my account, with moist eyes, her behaviour akin to a mother’s affection. It seemed to me as if she wanted to wait to see what I would do, and to make certain that I was happy, but I absolutely would not allow anything like that. Safiya will remain unsullied. She knows but she doesn’t hear. She hears but she doesn’t see. She sees but she doesn’t touch.

Safiya left, and I was alone with the girl from Utopia.

She’s helpless. Unconscious. She’s incapable of doing anything.

Victory!

This is the only victory I can achieve. Humiliating this girl isn’t
humiliating a woman, but it is humiliating a class as a whole. Humiliating circumstances …

Through me, she will see what she’s never seen before. Aren’t the guys of Utopia just girls with facial hair? Aren’t we the studs that their women tremble for in fear and desire? Don’t their women wish, as they lie in the arms of their husbands or lovers, that one of us would ravish them? Aren’t we the nightmare of the men of Utopia, and their permanent source of anxiety? Isn’t virility wheat that ripens in the sun of daily suffering?

The guy from Utopia is splattered with blood in El-Moallem Taha Square amid the chickens, and his woman is here at my mercy.

I was trembling from the enormity of the idea. Azza receded. Awatif. Nagat. The dream of something beyond sex receded.

My revenge will be dreadful. My revenge will be worthy of being revenge.

It will be …

It will be …

What is happening to me?

Whenever I looked at her face, I only saw Safiya’s brown face. The spoiled girl from Utopia vanished, and I no longer saw anything but Safiya’s beautiful, yet distressed face.

My desire shrivelled up completely and my body became a block of ice.

So I began slapping her cheeks roughly as she moaned and didn’t open her eyes. I shook her violently by the shoulders. I pulled a lock of her hair here and there, but still nothing. That’s all I’ve got.

I can’t and I don’t want to.

What came over you? Is Utopia’s power over you so absolute?
Has Utopia come to dominate your hormones, your adrenal gland, your pituitary, your penile corpus cavernosum, and your sympathetic apparatus? Has it sunk so far into you?

Is it the dominance of Utopia, or is it the power of a sweeping conscience that makes you see every fragile, guileless girl as another Safiya?

You won’t know. You’ll never know.

You are only sure of one thing: let this girl sleep in peace, and go back to the slaughterhouse to continue tearing out chicken guts.

When I returned to El-Moallem Taha Square, I didn’t look for the guy from Utopia; he could go to hell.

I continued my exhausting work cleaning out chicken guts and, hours later, the first, second, third and fourth piles had disappeared, and nothing was left except some piles that were being taken to the markets.

As soon as you finish your pile, you head to the back door of the square, where Khalil is standing. He hands everyone who goes out his share of chicken. A jumble of severed parts that, I think, are enough to make a whole chicken.

I walked a few steps and found the guy standing and waiting for me, with his share in his hand.

He was soaked in blood and sweat. Some of the blood was his. He handed me what was in his hand as if to say, ‘Here’s what you wanted. So take it and shut up.’

‘Today, you’ll be eating by the sweat of your brow for the first time,’ I told him, trying to make it sound like a joke.

‘First, lay off the life lessons,’ he said, between clenched teeth. ‘I’ve heard enough of them. Second, I won’t taste this thing. It’s turned me off chicken for ever.’

So we went back in silence to my house.

He won’t know what happened, because the girl will be stoned, and she’ll think that anything she saw or felt was just confused dreams.

I don’t want him to know. It’s not because I’m afraid of him: I’m afraid that he’ll know that I was incapable of hurting him when it was in my power to.

I seem to be incapable of killing the two of them, too.

Napoleon once stood in front of the soldiers who came to arrest him and, baring his chest, said, ‘I am your emperor, so kill me!’ But the soldiers couldn’t do it. Respect for the emperor made them get down on their knees before him and weep.

But this young guy isn’t Napoleon. Hell, no! He’s merely a lecherous animal from Utopia who commands not an iota of awe. The problem is that a psychological barrier, an internalised servility has been created inside me. The problem is that I myself am convinced that he is better, more amazing, more complete, and perhaps more pious.