Utopia (14 page)

A pinpoint of light moved across the tunnel. It dispelled the dark, and then vanished into a new darkness.

The sound of steps.

The sound of heavy breathing.

The sound of drops of water dripping onto rock.

Eventually I realised that we were at the bottom of another shaft and that steps going up were leading us to the surface. There were rocks piled up to make it easy to clamber onto the bottom rung. With difficulty, I stopped myself from shouting for joy, and Germinal’s chest began to heave.

‘For obvious reasons, I won’t be joining you,’ Gaber said as he pointed the torch up above. ‘You two are safe now. Goodbye. Only don’t come back and don’t try to hunt another one of us. I won’t be around the next time.’

‘You’re incredible, Gaber,’ Germinal said with emotion. ‘Thank you.’

He didn’t respond, but turned around to head back, the light of the torch surrounding him like a halo.

He must have been emotional until the last moment.

His faint smile must not have left his lips as his face fell and rolled in the dust.

He must not have tasted the blood that flowed from the corners of his mouth.

He must not have realised that I’d picked up a rock and brought it down on the back of his head as hard as I could.

I had to turn him over on his back and the blood flowed like a river from the bloody opening I had made a second ago.

His ruined eye looked steadily at me, but his glasses had shattered.

I got out the knife – the knife I had stolen from the slaughterhouse. It was strange: another knife was sticking out of his belt. He must have been as afraid of us as we were of him, and had wanted to keep himself safe.

‘Why did you do that?’ Germinal screamed hysterically. ‘He helped us!’

‘His task was complete,’ I replied, as I did what I had to do. ‘He was an idiot, and he had to pay the price. I didn’t take all this risk to go back without a souvenir.’

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to carry his body up the stairs. In any case, he was probably dead, and wouldn’t provide a source of amusement. So, nothing about him concerned me any longer except this thing that I took and wrapped in the dirty jacket he’d given me.

I left him where he was and climbed up the stairs. It would be a disaster if he had tricked us.

But it’s your nature to be king of the world

Ready to rule

Your hands are nice and soft from what we wove all through the pitch-black night

Arrest me, mister policeman

Beat the crap out of me and ruin my life

We’ve seen beyond our differences

Arrest me or let me go and tread all over me

We’ve seen beyond our differences

–Abdel Rahman el-Abnoudi

There’s an opening in the grass that is difficult to see if a person isn’t looking for it.

The opening was deliberately covered by branches that someone had carefully woven together. But when we moved the branches and stuck our heads out, we smelled the scent of sea air. We smelled the night mixed with perfume, human flesh and phlogistine.

We smelled the scent of dollars, credit cards and expensive liquor.

We saw the lights of Utopia surrounding us. A few steps away from Elite Mall, my favourite. I saw its colourful sign and the cars thronging around it. So we were in the garden behind the mall. Yes. I could see the statue of the naked female bather that I had so often dreamed of having sex with when I was young.

Thank God! We were saved!

It would be difficult for us to explain to any onlookers that we were not poor beggars who had sneaked in. The hardest thing would be to hide this arm, which had begun to drip blood. But we’d be meeting Egyptians or Israelis, and we’d be able to reason with them; unlike the Marines, who shot first and asked questions later.

I helped Germinal out of the hole, and we stood there in the chill of the sea air, amid the colourful evening lights, and we embraced each other.

The adventure is over and we’re saved!

We had been to hell and back. We had stuck our heads between the crocodile’s jaws and emerged.

I told her as we cut through Utopia’s streets, half-empty at this hour, ‘You could say we didn’t lose anything.’

‘Except for some rough moments,’ she replied, out of breath with emotion.

‘They must have searched high and low for us.’

‘They’ll understand and forgive.’

As she shivered, she said some words I couldn’t make out, so I asked her to raise her voice. She repeated, “We are two peoples, two peoples, two peoples. Look where the first is, and where’s the other. Draw the line between them, brother.” Wasn’t it his poet who said that?’

‘Oh yeah, and he was totally right about that!’

There were noisy parties to celebrate our return.

At first, there was a thin layer of reproach and scolding: a layer that melted instantly.

Then the real celebration began for the two returning heroes.

Rivers of booze and phlogistine flowed. I told our story a million times, and each time I added new details that provoked the imagination. I had become a man. I had gone there and returned, with someone’s severed arm.

I told them about that stupid Gaber. Naive Gaber, who couldn’t understand the rules of the game.

I told them about Safiya with tuberculosis who had fought as if she was Cleopatra. The amount of resistance should match the value of what that person is defending. In her situation, there was no call for putting up a fight of any kind.

‘It depends on how each person values what he’s defending,’ said Rasim as he let out a puff of smoke. ‘There’s no absolute standard. If you saw my mother defending her small pet mouse when my father wanted to toss it down the drain, you would have thought she was defending a holy icon. As far as that girl was concerned, she was defending the most important thing she had.’

‘Her virginity?’

‘Her will, actually. Her freedom of choice. That’s her own mouse.’

I treated him to some foul language. To hell with you when marijuana’s playing with your brain cells. It makes some people seem cleverer, but it just makes you show-off and mouth-off. It really turns you into a son of a bitch. Every one of us has his mouse that we consider the most precious thing
in the world. Maybe others see it as only a wretched little mouse, but as far as you’re concerned, it’s the most important thing in the universe. I wonder what my own pampered pet mouse is.

I’m
my own pampered pet mouse!

I brandished the arm that I’d had embalmed and dried.

‘Here’s to Gaber’s health!’

‘And Safiya’s!’

‘And el-Sirgani’s!’

‘Let’s give them a hand!’

From the stereo equipment pounded a new orgasm song:

Put your neck on the sacred stone!

Put your life on the sacred stone!

Watch the blade of the knife come down on the vein

Afraid, little girl? I love that, baby

You’re even stronger than nature, baby

‘Cause you’ve got my blood pumping again like crazy

It gets me high!

I bleed rivers!

That’s the moment I really love you

Put your neck, my little one

Put your neck on the sacred stone

Mahi gets up, kicks her shoes off and flails about wildly. She bends her neck as if she’s stretching it out on a rock. She tosses her hair left and right.

She falls to the ground in a submissive position, as if she’s ready to be slaughtered.

The blonde priestess of Utopia.

The orgasm music gets louder and we space out amid the green flames.

‘Put your neck, my little one.’

‘Put your neck.’

Wait until you see the dancing green flame …

Let it drip out all the perfumes of existence. Let it drip out the fragrance of ferns in the swamps where dinosaurs walked millions of years ago. Let it drip out the scent of Cleopatra’s sweat and Julius Caesar’s blood. Let it drip out the incense the dervishes burned in the nights of Fatimid Cairo. Let it drip out the flames that consumed Cairo, or so they told us, and let it drip out the fragrance of all the
belles
of Paris dancing the can-can. Let it drip out all the musk of sperm whales and the breath of Asian tigers slinking through the jungle darkness. Let it drip out the jungles themselves. Let it drip out the fragrances of pansy, narcissus, lilac and iris. Let it drip out all these scents together, then – then what? I forget …

I wake up. I take a leak. Smoke a cigarette. Drink coffee. Shave. Fix the wound on my forehead to make it look terrible. Have sex with the African maid. Have breakfast. Pour some milk on the eggs and beat them with a fork. Throw the disgusting mixture in the trash. Yawn. Laugh. Spit. Wolf down some roasted meat. Stick my finger down my throat. Enter Larine’s bedroom to puke on
the carpet. Laugh. Stick my finger in my ear. Grab a bottle of whiskey from the bar and take a swig. Dance. Stagger. Stand on the couch. Fall down on the carpet. Read the paper, which is nothing more than Utopia’s society pages. I take out a tube of phlogistine and pour some drops on my skin. I get high. See the green flames. Laugh. Walk naked in the living room. Put on my clothes. With a charcoal pencil, I draw slogans on the wall, saying:
Kill Whitey
. I put on some orgasm music.

In one hour, I’ve done everything, and there’s nothing left in life that interests me or that I want!

But the phone rang.

It was Rasim telling me some strange news.

‘Did you know that the planes are out of service?’

‘All of them? Why?’

He told me a strange story about an adventure the Others undertook two days ago. They attacked a huge convoy carrying biroil across the desert. You know they offload it from biroil tankers out west. The convoy was attacked and the drivers were taken hostage. It was an unprecedented act, and completely unexpected. The result was general confusion. The drivers remained in captivity for several hours, and then were released. They said they were treated well.

No one understood the reason for this raid. There was nothing to gain from it.

Then, when the planes’ fuel tanks were full again, Mustafa
bey
’s sports plane,
Bonanza
, tried to lift off and couldn’t. Upon investigation, it became clear that what was in its tank wasn’t fuel. Not one drop of biroil was in it. Someone had filled the biroil tanks with sewage!

The investigation concluded that this had happened when the
drivers were kidnapped. The tanks had been completely emptied, and then those damned sewage collection trucks came and filled the tanks with their disgusting contents.

The result was that the planes’ engines were all ruined.

Car engines were all ruined. That’s what people who tried to fill the tanks of their cars with this false ‘biroil’ discovered.

‘I would have been very surprised if the planes took off with shit for fuel!’ I said to Rasim with a laugh.

We burst out laughing, and went back and forth with a thousand jokes on this theme.

‘All well and good,’ Rasim said, after he could laugh no more, ‘but it’s not a pleasant situation at all. Repairing the planes and cars will take time. You know what that means? It means we’re really isolated.’

Really isolated.

The words continued to reverberate in my brain for some time.

The situation grew worse when Mourad sat down with us at the dinner table.

‘There’s no means of transport,’ he told Larine. ‘The smell of excrement rises from all the engines. The Marines are nervous and they’ve contacted units of the Sixth Fleet. There has to be an escape route, as you know, and that route was closed off by the planes’ breakdown. They promised them they would send us some helicopters as soon as USS
Jefferson
is near our territorial waters. That will take two days.

The smell of excrement from all the engines? That seemed hilarious to me, even if I didn’t take the trouble of laughing.

‘Do you expect that something will happen within two days?’ I asked him keenly.

‘There’s talk going around here and there,’ Mourad replied. ‘There’s some movement going on in the territory of the Others. They’re moving against us.’

‘What else is new? They do that twice a year and their enthusiasm quickly dies down.’

‘This time, they’re more violent, more determined, and more organised. They say that one of them helped rescue two people from Utopia from the territory of the Others, and kept them under his roof, but they killed him and cut off his arm after they raped his sister, who was a virgin! The Others found his corpse in a tunnel they use to sneak in here. The story has seeped into every shack and every alleyway there, and inflamed their passions. They have put up with a lot, but this was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back.’

I began eating, trying not to give anything away. I rearranged my features to look like a man who hadn’t cut off the arm of one of the Others.

‘They’ve been robbed of everything and they’ve kept silent, so what difference does one death make?’ Larine said, downplaying the situation. ‘I don’t think revolutions happen because of things like that.’

‘Actually, they only happen because of things like that. As the saying goes, “The rock endured many blows, but only shattered at the fiftieth.” It’s not the fiftieth blow that did that, but all the previous ones.’

‘That’s from children’s stories.’

‘And are angry mobs anything but children?’

You sold the land with plough and axe – on her people’s backs

Before the eyes of the world, you undid her clothes

Stark naked she was, from head to toes,

Front and back, knees to nose

You could smell her breath a mile away

We the people are sons of dogs

We belong to the Beautiful One

And his way is hard

With the kick of a boot and the whack of a cane

Then we die in the war, all in vain

– Abdel Rahman el-Abnoudi

His name was Gaber. He was an idiot who didn’t understand the rules of anything.

In some way, the poor deserve the circumstances they find themselves in. They are less clever than our fathers. They are weak-willed and lazy. They let themselves be robbed all this time without lifting a finger. That’s why they have sunk lower than animals. Even a bee stings you if you try to steal its honey, and the chicken pecks at your fingers if you try to steal its eggs; but they remained afraid and silent.