Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (27 page)

Heshmat didn’t like the question, not coming from a young American woman. He frowned and launched into a lecture on the feminist values of Islam. Muslim women keep their names after marriage, own property, and choose their husbands, he argued. “Islam grants so much liberty, but only in a moral framework,” he said. “This moral framework benefits us a lot. It gives us a lower HIV rate, makes sure there are no children out of wedlock.”

You didn’t answer the question about head scarves, I said.

“We get asked all the time to respect others, but others should also respect us and our privacy and our specifications,” he said, shooting me a sharp look. “Globalization shouldn’t be a globalization of morals, of interfering in affairs of every stripe.”

It didn’t go much better with the other candidate, Mubarak’s man. His name was Moustafa Fiqi. He had been educated in London and sent around the world as an Egyptian diplomat. He hadn’t won the election yet, and theoretically the odds were against him. But powerful
people in Cairo were already whispering that he would rise to a prominent role within Parliament.

Fiqi hardly bothered to campaign in Damanhour. Instead, he borrowed a computer shop to serve as headquarters and dispatched his “campaign manager,” who turned out to be a mid-ranking intelligence officer.

When I met Fiqi, he flashed Dior cufflinks and spoke careful English. The Muslim Brotherhood, he argued, was trying to take over the country. The national anthem scratched, over and over, from a cassette player.

“Our Brothers on the other side should know, and I’ve announced from the beginning, I’ll quit if there’s any rigging,” he pledged in a campaign rally that night. “I believe in my freedom and the freedom of others.”

That was the last I saw of Fiqi.

The diplomats lounged in a teahouse off the main square, sipping thimbles of Lipton and looking pleased with themselves. They were two men, both on the young side, an American and a Frenchman. It was election day, and they’d trekked from Cairo to observe the balloting. We hauled chairs over to join them.

Everything’s quiet here, they said, draining their teacups, postures slack. We’re going to move on.

We’ve heard they’ve been fighting since morning, we said.

We don’t see anything, they said. They were bored. They were headed by car for Alexandria.

Hossam and I wandered around the corner to the closest polling station—and into the heart of a standoff. Bearing helmets, clubs, and riot shields, the Egyptian soldiers had surrounded and sealed off a school where the voting was supposed to take place. The men clustered as close as they dared, packed the alleys and side streets, pressed themselves against the worn shops. They wanted to vote but instead they cowered, glaring at the soldiers. A skinny young man peeled himself out of the crowd, straightened his spine, and marched toward the polling station. The soldiers pounced: shoes and fists flying in the dirt, they beat and kicked him to the ground
and dragged him off toward the paddy wagons. The rest of the men glared some more.

On the eerily empty bit of road between the two sides, I stood awkwardly with Hossam. We made the security forces uncomfortable, I guess. They ran hostile eyes over us, muttering to one another. I stared back, wary. When I covered demonstrations in Cairo, the police and soldiers had pushed me around, slapped me, groped at my breasts and backside, ripped at my clothes. One glaring summer day, a pack of government thugs had pinned my female translator to the ground, kicked her, and sexually molested her. Working as a journalist in Egypt had taught me what it was like to fight, physically—to thrash instinctively, to pound at flesh until the air opened around my own body, until I was clear.

Hossam tugged a camera from his pocket and quietly snapped a few pictures of the riot police.

Before we saw them coming, lumpy thugs swarmed. Hammy fingers snatched Hossam’s camera away. Hossam bellowed, scrawny arms clawing after his prized possession.

“
Sahafiyeh
!” I yelled, digging around in my jeans pocket for a press credential. “Journalists! Give us the camera back!”

They separated us, and thick male bodies closed around me. Hossam’s voice came from a place I could not see, behind a wall of flesh, still hollering about his camera. No time to think or feel; there was only a wash of white rage, the accumulated anger of all the fights with the henchmen of Mubarak’s ruling party. A sharp awareness and a deadening at the same time, I felt it flooding through my veins like chemicals. This time, I was sure they would beat Hossam. They would beat him because he was Egyptian, because he was a man, and because he had come with a foreigner. And it would be my fault, because I hired him and brought him here. I forced my hands into the light between two of the thugs and tried to drive their bodies apart, to get to Hossam. One of them, a man with bulbous muscles and hair pomaded into place, shoved me backward. I pushed him back, as hard as I could, cursing him in English. He showed his teeth. We grappled; he hit me in the face.

“God DAMN you!” I shouted miserably, and pushed him again.

I wanted to cover an election, and instead I had to fight in the street.
I thought about the teahouse diplomats who came to see but didn’t bother to look; about how my own government pumped Egypt full of a billion dollars and then some, asking nothing in return but the maintenance of a frosty peace with Israel. I remembered the American human rights official who told me that Egypt, of all the Arab states, came closest to having a modern-day gulag, and the U.S. officials who stayed mostly silent in the face of torture and arrest and misery. The pictures swam through my mind: soldiers beating people bloody to keep them from voting; four-course lunches with necktie-clad Americans at the embassy in Cairo; the knowledge that my own government lurked in the background, propping up this machine of greasy, perverted men, not seeing this because it was convenient not to see.

The men turned their backs and left, sneering over their shoulders, taking Hossam’s camera with them. I stood with heart hammering on the muddy street slick with the shit of water buffalo, blown with fading trash. I touched my stinging face. Hossam’s eyes were bulging with anger. “Okay,” I told him stupidly. “Okay.”

I tried to tell myself that the best revenge would be to document all of it, every little piece, write it all down and commit the story to the public record. This is how you are supposed to think, but it doesn’t always make sense. I was struggling to channel the anger. I wanted to share this strategy with Hossam, but I mangled the words.

“We just have to keep going now. Forget about your camera. Forget it. We’ll think about it later. This is not about us, okay? We’re not the story here.”

“Bastards,” he said. I patted his back awkwardly; it felt stiff as stone under my fingers. He didn’t want my consolation; he was seething. This was his fight, his future, his broken promises. It was his country, not mine.

We were joined on the streets by our friend, an American analyst with the International Crisis Group, shaking his head from side to side. When he finally spoke, the words came out slow and matter of fact:

“I’m not convinced that if the Muslim Brotherhood took over, imposed sharia, and started chopping off heads in Tahrir Square, it would be worse. If there were some justice to how they were chopping heads, it might be better.”

Dusk smeared the steely sky. APCs loomed on the streets; the army had deployed artillery to keep the people out of the polling stations. Darkness injected the crowd with new recklessness. The promised day of justice and retribution had been wasted; the hours burned off like fog, and people were crazy with rage.

Men snatched up chunks of broken lumber. Little boys lobbed rocks at the steel swell of armored vehicles. “I can’t believe we’re in
Egypt
,” I told Hossam. He shook his head, eyes darting around. The pop of tear gas canisters rang in alleys, then a dull hiss as chemical clouds swallowed the butcher shops, cigarette stands, and teahouses. Children squeezed themselves flat against the buildings and wept. We buried our noses in the crooks of our arms, eyes streaming, throats clenched. Out of the haze stumbled Sayed, our driver, hacking and choking. I couldn’t tell if he was coming to fetch us, or looking for shelter from the gas. He didn’t seem to know either; he just wept and coughed. People were shredding rags, soaking them in water, pressing them to their mouths. Egyptian hospitality unflagged, they kept offering me their rags because I was a foreigner.

“May God avenge me!” screamed a nearby man, tripping down the street with tears coursing down his face. “Take a picture of me while I’m crying,” he sniffled.

“I can’t,” Hossam snapped.

The tanks loomed like dinosaurs through the haze. Forms stumbled forth, scattered words at our feet, and lurched onward. Rubber bullets slammed through the air.

“We are determined to vote in spite of this,” said Reda Shamma, a twenty-three-year-old engineering student who washed up at our side like something tossed from the sea. He raked his hands through his hair. He didn’t seem to realize he was screaming.

“We won’t elect somebody with liquor at his place,” he ranted on. “He’s against God’s choice and we can’t elect this guy, we just can’t.”

In the square the men chanted: “Fiqi, you fucking pimp; Fiqi, you fucking pimp …”

“Look at this!” another man shouted. He handed over one of the
spent tear gas canisters. He pointed to the block lettering.
MADE IN THE USA
, it said. He looked at me, waiting for an answer.

I had none to give.

Cold darkness fell over the town. The polls closed. A drizzle began. A long winter sat ready to swallow the countryside. Boys wheeled on bikes; women wandered along the edges of the canals. When you passed people in the street, they muttered his name: Gamal Heshmat. But they didn’t look at you, and they kept walking.

Judges packed the padlocked ballot boxes into taxicabs and drove them to the military academy, where they would be counted by hand. The street in front of the counting station writhed with bodies. It was the kind of crowd so big and mad that it forces you to cede control; it will bear you along, but if you resist it can crush you. The Brotherhood representatives who worked for Heshmat tried to follow the taxis toward the school. They had a right to monitor the vote count. But the police turned them away and hauled out metal barriers.

A chant rose from the crowd:
With our blood and our souls we will sacrifice for you, Islam
. If they fake our votes, we will die here, they said, eyes snapping and flashing. The officials marching past bore duffel bags, backpacks, and bulky brown paper packages. The crowd attacked one of the officials and ripped the sack from beneath his arm.

The package was crammed with blank ballots, each one marked with the official eagle stamp of the Interior Ministry. “We’re being raped!” the people howled. “It’s fraud! It’s fraud!” Hundreds, thousands of blank ballots piled in the street like snowdrifts, shredded under a scuffle of sandals. Men pounced on the paper like children snatching at candy from a piñata, scooped the ballots up, yelling all the while. They were righteous; they had proof! But they looked around and realized there was nobody to show. A man stopped and stared in my eyes. “Please tell everything you see here today to the international organizations with great frankness,” he said. I nodded. I didn’t bother to answer. People in these places always cling to that hope—that somewhere in the world, something stronger than their government is watching. Against all evidence, they still believe in referees. They see me, a foreigner, and think I
represent the referee. They don’t know that this story has been written before, over and over again, and still the status quo sits stolid.

A slight man in a sweater vest and necktie lingered at the edge of the crowd, watching with weary eyes. He did not scream or wave the ballots. He was a forty-seven-year-old engineer. “I am not a Muslim Brother,” he told me pointedly. But watching his hometown vote get rigged, he was melancholy.

“I did my best to be a good man in this society,” he said, carefully pronouncing the English words. “But I feel too much small. I cannot find myself in my own country.”

He waved an arm at the ballots. “I am feeling that I am nothing,” he said. “I want to feel that I am a man, that I am a member of this society.” He shook his head, and stopped talking.

Boots clattered on the sidewalk; police conscripts had come to control the mob. They ringed the school and probed the crowd with anxious eyes. Some of the Brothers slipped near and spoke to them quietly over their shields. “All of this is just for you,” one of the Brothers said. “We’re doing this just for you, so you shouldn’t beat us.”

The conscripts nodded and smiled blankly at the Brothers. They looked young, underfed, and nervous. “What a black night,” one of the conscripts muttered to his neighbor. And then he said it again: “What a black night.”

The rain came slowly at first, but then the skies opened. The streetlights with their cheap wiring sizzled and snapped overhead. The dust turned to mud in the road and then disappeared under gleaming puddles.