Once Upon a Revolution (24 page)

State Security was accustomed to control. The hooligans it deployed to beat demonstrators, voters, and women were small-time criminals and hoods who owed a debt to the police. They could be beaten or locked up anytime as a reminder. The angry masses of Maspero, however, were harder to control. Some of the men who brought their clubs and swords to Maspero and the Coptic Hospital acted out of patriotism as they understood it, out of a warped but sincere sense of honor; they were under no one's control, including their own. That combustibility made Maspero terrifying. State Security's vile act of self-preservation could easily detonate sectarian war. As I knew from Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza, each home could suffer a world's worth of loss. The thought of the same thing happening here, in a place so recently a font of possibility, provoked in me a bottomless sense of loss, like the death of a beloved friend in his prime. It was terrifying. What would happen if Tahrir failed, supplanted by something as nihilistic as the carnage around Maspero? What would happen not just to Egypt but also to our ability to hope for profound and improbable change? I wasn't sure that my faith could withstand such a blow.

Even in death, the murdered protesters weren't free from persecution. The military exerted influence everywhere in order to delete evidence of its crimes. Under pressure, the coroner issued absurd death certificates that made no reference to bullet wounds or tire marks. The cause of death for a boy who had been shot was determined to be heart failure. An energetic
priest named Father Filopatir, who had marched the night before with protesters, was now showing his more reactionary side. He supported Christian protesters within limits, but his main loyalty was the conservative church hierarchy, which definitely didn't want to anger the SCAF. The priest was now taking the lead as the church's fixer, trying to bully families into quick funerals without autopsies. Christians already grieving their personal losses had to contend with a church that seemed more interested in protecting killers than in sheltering its flock. For families reeling with grief, it was a degrading choice: accept a fraudulent death certificate to get the burial over with, or embark on a fight with the bureaucracy in the slim hope of future justice for the murder of a child or fiancé or sibling. There were twenty-four dead, most of them piled in the morgue at the Coptic Hospital. Their photographs already plastered Facebook and Twitter, often in montages that contrasted their mangled, bruised faces with snapshots from earlier times.

Sally roamed the hospital's small interior courtyard, cornering relatives of the dead. Many of them were from rural areas and believed that the dead must be buried within a day. Softly, Sally tried to explain the importance of another small delay. A crime like the Maspero massacre might take years, or an eternity, to be justly reckoned, but it would never happen without a deliberate record, including proof of how the victims had been killed by the army. “We need the autopsy reports if there is ever going to be justice for our martyrs,” she explained. Even within her own community, Sally was trying to negotiate between the religious and the secular. After confronting another family, she slumped down on a bench. A diamond cross glittered on her neck where the cross-and-crescent unity pendant normally hung. Her face was swollen from sleeplessness and sadness. “So much superstition,” Sally said in frustration. “I can't believe this!”

It was quieter in the courtyard than by the morgue, and the sun was less intense. Moaz, Sally, and Mostafa Shawqi, Mina Daniel's friend, repaired to a long bench to wait.

“We told the families that we should find out how these people died now,” Moaz said. “If autopsies prove the military ran these people over, then the protests will be huge.”

Moaz had posted photos of the dead on his Facebook page and was looking at them again now. He was mourning the revolution, but also his friend Mina. After the Battle of the Camel in Tahrir, when Moaz had stitched up Mina's temples, the two men had become friends. Mina had a sweet and disarming way of persuading Coptic activists to branch out into broader revolutionary ventures while also alerting mainstream, mostly Muslim activists to the particular injustices visited on Christians. People liked him and listened to him. Mina had represented one of the revolution's best impulses: a move away from parochial self-interest toward a quest for universal rights. He began as a Christian activist and ended his life widely admired for representing everybody.

All along Ramses Street, the crowd exuded dread and anxiety. Thousands outside the hospital waited to escort the bodies to the Coptic Cathedral, expecting attacks on the funeral cortege. Some kept themselves energized with chants: “Mohammed was an adulterer! Muslims are infidels! Down with military rule!” A stench of rot enveloped the courtyard outside the morgue. Twenty-four hours after the massacre, hundreds of relatives and friends were still waiting inside the building for corrected death certificates, accompanied by almost all the revolution's core activists. Moaz, Asmaa Mahfouz, and other Muslim activists tried to calm sectarian fears, but everyone had noticed that none of Egypt's organized Islamic forces had bothered to condemn the massacre or send condolences. No representatives came from the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafis to offer even pro forma sympathy.

Asmaa Mahfouz wandered around with a legal pad, talking gently, asking questions, and taking notes. “Look to the SCAF,” she repeated to everyone. “We were together, Muslims and Copts, marching to Maspero. Suddenly we felt the attack. Why? To divide us, to make us forget about the SCAF and instead have Muslims and Christians fight each other.”

A boy leaned against a wall in a small interior courtyard of the hospital, silent, his eyes red. Two friends were with him, one Muslim and one Christian. His brother Sobhi Gamal Nazim, twenty-seven, had been killed by a bullet to the pelvis.

“God will retaliate for what is happening now,” said Bushra Basilios, a Christian who quoted scripture nearly every time he spoke.

“Not every Muslim is a fundamentalist,” said Ahmed Shaker, a Muslim. “And not all Christians are forgiving. Some of them are bigots.”

“The owner of this world is a devil,” muttered Basilios.

“We've all lost a lot,” Ahmed said. “We ask God: No more, please. Really, it's enough.”

Ahmed showed pictures on his cell phone of Sobhi alive and then of Sobhi dead, his life swiped out of this world with a quick flick of the scroll button. The dead man's brother, Wagdy, held his gaze on an indeterminate point in space somewhere above our heads.

“No one will give us our rights,” he said. He convulsed in sobs. “God is great,” he said over and over, inflecting it like a question.

A man wounded the night before was wheeled into the courtyard. Bandages covered his arms and head. He caught sight of my friend Joe, a Christian who wore a long beard only vaguely reminiscent of the kind that Salafis grew. The wounded man reared up in his wheelchair and grabbed Joe. “Fuck your religion!” he screamed. “Goddamn your religion!”

Wagdy, sobbing for his own dead brother, stepped forward to protect Joe, who was absorbing the blows, and then wrapped his arms around his attacker in a bear hug. Despite the deepening divisions in society, the mourners were trying their best to remain unified.

The consensus among families of the wounded was that Field Marshal Tantawi and his SCAF had engineered the massacre either to put Christians on notice and keep them in line behind the old regime, or to initiate an ethnic cleansing project.

Father Filopatir strode back and forth through the courtyard. Already he had convinced four families to forgo autopsies. Their bodies were about to go to the cathedral for a blessing by Pope Shenouda. A lesser cleric would preside for the remaining families that insisted on accountability. Mina Daniel's family glared at Filopatir.

A scuffle broke out between Wagdy, who had decided to give up on an autopsy for his brother, and his Muslim friend Ahmed, who was trying to change his mind. Their voices climbed until they shoved each other.

“He won't get his rights without an autopsy,” Ahmed said.

“I just want to bury my brother,” Wagdy replied.

“He's as precious to me as he is to you!”

“Enough!” Wagdy said, weeping. “Enough.”

Moaz watched without interfering. “I feel sad,” Moaz said. “This is not the new Egypt. This is not freedom.”

Moaz had been in the hospital since the early morning and hadn't gone to bed the night before. Neither of us had eaten all day, and with the afternoon sun baking the hospital courtyard, we decided to take a walk. There was little to do other than wait: for the autopsies, for the funerals, for the inevitable nationwide reaction. He led me by the arm out of the hospital. We retreated with a bagful of sodas and wafers to his car, where we sat sweating while he charged his phone. Absentmindedly, he scrolled through Facebook pictures of the dead on his tablet computer.

“Have you seen this one?” For the second time that afternoon, he showed me a close-up of the teenage boy whose head had been run over by the armored personnel carrier. Somehow his face and head had remained intact but were grotesquely misshapen. The photo was widely circulated because of how clearly it suggested a crime.

I blanched. “I don't need to see it again,” I said. I'd already seen the actual dead; I didn't need to look anymore. It was hard enough to contemplate the grief and fear of the survivors.

Moaz thought there could be more massacres in the days to come, and that afterward the elections would be ruined. Either sectarian violence would delay the vote indefinitely, or else it would go ahead as planned but without any meaningful participation by revolutionary youth. “This incident will leave marks for years,” Moaz predicted. “We are starting something new in our history.”

Thanks to the persistent efforts of the activists, seventeen out of the twenty-four families of the dead withstood Filopatir's pressure and insisted on a new coroner's report. At nightfall, they still were waiting for a forensic team. Empty coffins lined the loading ramp outside the morgue, awaiting the bodies once the autopsies were complete. Heaps of gardenia blossoms were everywhere, their scent strangling the courtyard. Posters of the new martyrs covered each coffin.

In the courtyard, Mina Daniel's mother slumped over his coffin. “We were supposed to be going to your wedding,” she sobbed, slapping her face and thighs in grief. “The government engineered all this to divide us.”

She gripped the hands of her daughters and of a parade of activists who had loved her son. Despite her torment and wailing, she was lucid, looking at everyone with recognition. She turned toward the brick wall and banged her face against it. Mina's sister tried to stop her.

“Enough. Stop,” the girl said to her mother, pulling her helplessly away from the wall by the shoulder.
“Bas. Bas.”

We went around the corner to the interior courtyard, now deserted. I leaned against a wall and began to sob. The grief of Mina's mother overwhelmed me. The loss of a child seemed impossible to bear. I thought of my own children at home: my baby girl and my little boy. Even as our children grow up, they are always our babies, and our imperative is to protect them. Mina's mother had done her best, and it had not been enough. I wept for every death and every survivor I had ever encountered until that moment, every individual soul that had been devoured by history in Iraq, in Lebanon, everywhere, a senseless parade of killing. Over the years, I had raged against it, until at some point I had resigned myself numbly. Now the rage flooded back, but along with it came a sense of renewed fellowship. Through wars and uprisings, I had sat in sympathy with mothers and fathers, chronicling their fears, their anguish at the murders of their children, but always I had stepped back emotionally, so that I wouldn't intertwine my own feelings too much with theirs. Today I felt no such distance. I abandoned the idea of removing myself. I could not hold back from identifying with these revolutionaries, and I did not want to. I believed in their hopes and ideals and felt the fear, anxiety, and despair in Mina's mother, in Moaz, in Basem, in all their friends, as if the emotions were my own. It was unbearable, and yet, it had to be borne and transcended, for the sake of the revolution and its ideals. Resistance in the face of death is the most potent weapon of the weak.

Finally, the new death certificates were ready. The activists had won this small battle. “They can't say he died of a heart attack now,” Mina Daniel's aunt said, clutching the paperwork.

One by one, the bodies were loaded into the coffins and placed in a line. By now it was nearly midnight, and tens of thousands of mourners had assembled to march to the funeral. Perhaps sensing the desperation of this crowd, the thugs stayed away. Without incident, the mourners
marched the length of Ramses Street and through the cathedral's enormous gates, chanting, “Either we get our rights or die like they did!” After the service, a few hours before dawn, Mina's friends honored his last wish, escorting his body to Tahrir, ignoring the stones thrown their way as they approached the square to circle the place that Mina had so loved and for whose ideal he lost his life.