Otared Read online

  Born in 1978, Mohammad Rabie is the author of three acclaimed novels. His first novel, Amber Planet, won first prize in the Emerging Writers category of the Sawiris Cultural Award in 2012. He lives in Cairo, Egypt.

  Robin Moger is the translator of Women of Karantina by Nael Eltoukhy, among other books, and his translation for Writing Revolution won the 2013 English PEN Award for outstanding writing in translation. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

  Otared

  Mohammed Rabie

  Translated by

  Robin Moger

  This electronic edition published in 2016 by

  Hoopoe

  113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

  420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

  www.hoopoefiction.com

  Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press

  www.aucpress.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Mohammed Rabie

  First published in Arabic in 2014 as ‘Utarid by Dar al-Tanwir

  Protected under the Berne Convention

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Robin Moger

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978 977 416 784 3

  eISBN 978 161 797 751 0

  Version 1

  Otared

  A Beginning

  THIS LINE OF BLOOD PUT me in mind of many things.

  It was traced on the wall, not quite vertically but leaning at a slight angle and at its apex looping sharply back to the ground. Small droplets hung down, running from the edge of the bend. It reminded me of an ostrich’s tail feather, a column of water rising from a fountain, the glowing tracks of fireworks launched across the sky.

  The butcher was a true professional. With his massive cleaver, he struck the calf’s forelegs a single blow to bring the beast down, then passed the same blade over its neck, opening the rosy throat and an artery, and sending the blood jetting out in a clean line—dragged down by gravity, held horizontal by the pumping heart—only to meet the wall a few centimeters away and describe itself: the classic profile of airborne liquid, a shape about to be lost forever and then preserved, a stroke upon the wall.

  Many people ate from the flesh of the slaughtered calf. They say raw meat stimulates the sex drive, or so I’ve heard, and certainly the rites have something rousing about them: the slaughter, the mingled stench of blood and dung, the skinning, the carcass hung up and butchered, the sight of dozens standing waiting for a cut of meat, of kids off to one side eating lumps of raw liver, still hot and soft, of a man rushing off with his plastic bag full of meat and smiling as he goes . . . and then me, sat watching it all in my white robe, relaxing after the exertion of many months.

  The Eid al-Adha holiday: a fine opportunity to derail your diet, kick back, and find out what’s going on out in the countryside; to ponder, too, the relationship between flesh and sex.

  In the evening, the poor gathered in numbers, come to eat from the vast spread laid out for them. They sat on the ground around a spotless white cloth with empty bowls of various shapes and sizes before them, and then a charity worker came around, dishing two pieces of meat for each person from a huge pot carried by his colleague, picking them out with his bare hand, and not bending to place them in the bowl but waiting until the dish was lifted, then letting them fall—at which the pauper would immediately start eating. Boiled meat swaddled in fat: gray flesh, white fat. To me, it all looked revolting, but those doing the eating were thoroughly enjoying themselves.

  On the wall before me a line of blood was traced like that I’d seen five days earlier, during Eid at my family’s place in the country. On this occasion, it had come from the artery of a sixteen-year-old boy. Between wall and bed, in the narrow gap no more than fifty centimeters wide, his body was crammed into a most outlandish pose: head to one side, mouth squashed but open, the two arms raised with palms half-folded into fists and, stranger still, his legs also raised—knees up by his face and one broken, the lower half dangling forlornly from the joint and resting along the side of the corpse. On the opposite wall, clearly visible to the naked eye, was the line of blood. It looked to me as though the owners of the apartment had recently repainted the walls. The pale cream was even and flawless, unmarked by fingerprints, unscuffed by furniture: a wall in one color, a canvas or a blank page, and the line of blood showing its color ever stronger.

  I was on my own. I’d rushed impetuously to the address provided to find officers from the Emergency Force had beaten me to it. Some stood dazed in the living room. Others were on the stairs outside the apartment. None had been into the bedrooms, just peeked past the open doors at what lay inside, and sure enough they’d been careful not to touch a thing—not out of any desire to keep the crime scene uncontaminated as the rules dictate, but because they were frightened. It was when I looked into the eyes of the first officer that I understood. I know what the eyes of a frightened police officer look like. It’s impossible to put into words. We’re the only ones who recognize it, who share it. Wordlessly, we confess our fear. We share the burden between all those who lie within the circle of trust. I’d been in the same position many times myself, prey to the same fear, had shared my burden with colleagues using that same look and, a few times, carried it alone, and I know the pressure it brings. I was informed that the father had killed his family and prepared myself for a lot of blood, but the officer’s look told of something more. For an instant, some of his fear transmitted itself to me and I understood that fear would be with me for a long time.

  The owner of the house was sitting in the living room in front of the television, his shoulders covered with a light blanket and staring at the screen. He seemed to be eating from a bowl held between his hands. In a well-stuffed armchair sat an elderly man, his hands in his lap and his head resting against the back of the chair, and I saw at a glance that he’d been dead for hours. The other man was watching an old film—Ismail Yassin cavorting in a shady dive and singing the praises of alcohol, the other patrons all warbling along—and wolfing from his plate with a spoon. The smell was deadly—rot, and excrement, and cooked meat, and vomit—and I noticed hardened lumps of shit beneath the dead man, on his chair and the floor at his feet, even as the other finished his meal, laid the dish down beside him, and went on watching the film. I realized then that my brother officer’s fear had been an unvarnished response to the scene before him.

  The officer told me that there were four more bodies: the young man in the first bedroom, his older sister in the second, and the mother and a young boy in the third. They had been killed by thrusts from a kitchen knife, dealt out by the father now sitting in front of the television. The rigidity of the corpses and the smell of decomposition suggested that he had killed them two or three days ago.

  The kitchen was in a state of chaos: pots and bowls all over the floor and table, a putrid stench, patches of dried vomit on the floor, and shit everywhere.

  In the first bedroom, I stood transfixed before the corpse of the boy wedged between the bed and the wall, and after a minute had passed I realized that I was slowly losing consciousness. Losing it and conscious of it. I pushed out of the room and out of the apartment. It was on the top floor, so I climbed the stairs to the roof and there, beneath stars that choked on the filthy air, I threw up.

  The nausea was overwhelming. Unable to stand, I sat on the grimy rooftop, trying to bring my stomach under control. The boy’s bizarre posture, his rigid body, face turned to the wall and hidden from sight, were images that would never leave me, as though etched into my memory for eternity. And most regrettably, t
hey brought back every corpse I’d ever clapped eyes on since starting in this job: wretched faces, slack mouths, half-closed eyes surrendered to death. I made an effort to suck in fresh air, something other than the rancid fug inside the apartment. I filled my lungs as full as they would go. A gray haze lay between the stars and moon and me, and looking up I saw, among those stars, the faces of a family. I saw their names spelled out beneath their pictures in the paper: Wife—Abir Abdel Haqq, 37; Daughter—Farida, 11; Daughter—Sally, 4. And my picture with them: Captain Ahmed Otared. Husband. Father. The article bore no headline, contained no details, just black lines beneath the pictures where the writing would be, nothing I could make out or understand, and yet I knew that this was an item about how I’d murdered them, without the faintest idea who they were or why I was certain that I’d killed them and had changed their fate for a better one, even if it had been death. Then I saw that I would kill many people, and that a great number of people would be killed in whose deaths I’d play no part. I saw that people would kill their children and eat their flesh, and I saw that the man sitting, eating, and watching television had broken the last of the seals and set loose everything that would later come to pass. All this I saw and I understood nothing.

  This was before I had entered the remaining rooms. Before I had seen the other bodies. Before I had seen what the man had recorded on his phone.

  The investigation and confessions established that the father had killed his family with the kitchen knife, then spent several hours preparing for the next stage. He had laid out a small knife and various cooking pots, and proceeded to chop onions, peel garlic, and deseed a large quantity of tomatoes. Next, taking his sharp little knife, he had chopped off their lips, noses, and ears, prized out their eyes, sliced away portions of their calves and thighs, and dug out his wife’s breasts. He had put the eyes in a small bowl, the ears and lips in a larger one, and the chunks of flesh in a third, while the breasts he’d laid in an earthenware dish. He had added the chopped onion, garlic, and tomatoes to the bowls, and then cooked it all in the kitchen. The smell of food had suggested meat being cooked for Eid, and the neighbors hadn’t suspected a thing. The father had taken calls from family members, accepting their good wishes—had even called some of them himself—and when they’d asked after the family, he’d said that his son was out with friends, the other children were asleep, and his wife was in the shower.

  But the father had been careful to solicit the approval of the grandfather, the man I’d seen dead alongside him. He told us that he had recorded much of what had happened on his phone and with a camcorder. We had already extracted all the recordings and added them to the case file by the time he told us this, and with the footage we had it looked like this was going to be easy: a clean case with no complications, death sentence for the father guaranteed. If it hadn’t been for the cooking business, it would have been a textbook case. Run of the mill.

  Most of what took place was caught on camera. We found a clip of the father cutting up a section of his wife’s thigh, and another of him slicing her breasts, as if giving a demonstration of his technique. There was a clip of him unhurriedly and calmly chopping noses, ears, and eyes—except for the eldest son’s. He was left untouched. The father said that the boy had resisted fiercely, had died suffering, and so hadn’t deserved to be cut up and eaten. Then there was another clip of him placing all the flesh in a bowl, adding vegetables and seasoning, and stirring everything together. A long clip of a steel saucepan with its Perspex lid, and the meat gently stewing inside; the longest of the lot.

  But the most extraordinary set of recordings were those of the man’s father—the dead grandpa swamped in his filth on the well-stuffed armchair.

  The camera had been mounted on its tripod. The footage was of higher quality and clarity than the earlier recordings taken from the phone. Father and grandfather filled the screen, the former attempting to feed the latter from a dish in his hand. He was holding it in his left hand, bringing it up to the grandfather’s face, and lifting out a spoon containing a small quantity of meat. The grandfather glared at him furiously, slapped at the dish, and shouted something in his face with such anger that we couldn’t catch what he had said. By that stage in the investigation, everything was crystal clear, but we still needed an explanation or a clarification—a hint, at least—as to the motive, and the angry grandfather came as a surprise to us all. It was clear that the grandfather was immobile, that his old age confined him to the chair, and that he was aware of what his son was doing but had no way of stopping him. He knew that his son was chopping up his grandchildren one after the other, and no doubt knew that he had cooked them. The most he could manage, it seemed, was to slap the dish and send it flying. It was all he could do.

  In the next clips, the father was trying to persuade the grandfather to eat. Pressing him to eat. Whispering things we couldn’t hear. We couldn’t hear a thing he said, and couldn’t imagine what a man might say to convince his father to eat the flesh of his own grandchildren. Initially the grandfather reacted angrily. “You’re a liar,” he was shouting. “Don’t say that. . . .” The father spoke calmly, whispering, and the grandfather turned from anger to despondency, from shouting to weeping, and then to moans. The more the father spoke to him, the more he moaned, and the recording ended with the grandfather murmuring, “Enough . . . enough. . . .”

  The next recording had been made a few hours later. By now a whole day had passed since the murders had been committed. Father and grandfather were seated as before, and the grandfather was trying to force himself to eat from the dish held by his son. He was gripping the spoon, bringing it to his mouth, and saying, “It’s better for them. . . . Fine. . . . But I just can’t. . . . It’s not. . . . To eat them’s not . . . to kill them. . . .” Then he began to whimper like a child, and ate the first spoonful.

  Between each spoonful and the next, the grandfather wept. He was eating and murmuring, “It’s best for them. A good father, a good grandfather. . . . They’ll go to heaven for sure. . . . They won’t come back here. . . .” Then he finished the first bowl, and after that he was silent, though he went on eating with a strangely mechanical air. In less than half an hour, he’d worked through five helpings, and the clip ended as he laid the empty dish in the father’s hands.

  From the autopsy, we learned that he had died from severe poisoning and had expelled a torrent of shit and vomit before he’d passed. The father must have watched him dying and not moved a muscle. The pair of them had been on a suicide mission to eat the victims: the grandfather had died almost immediately, while the father had gone on eating even after we had entered the apartment. He had eaten and eaten, getting up to defecate anywhere and everywhere. Five whole days, and not a thought for keeping himself or the apartment clean. We later found out from the medical report that between them they’d consumed more than fifty kilos of flesh.

  On the sixth day, a neighbor called the Emergency Force, bothered by a putrid stench issuing from the apartment next door. The father had calmly opened the door to the jumpy officers, then gone back to the television to finish the very last bowlful of a feast that had lasted all the days of Eid.

  We all know the rules: not a finger must be laid on the killer. He is to be treated with great gentleness. Officers, recruits, and prisoners treat him as a dead man—particularly if he’s confessed, particularly if he hasn’t resisted or screamed at us. This is a man marching to the gallows of his own accord, so let him march.

  During the trial, the judge didn’t ask him much, other than the one repeated question: had he killed his family or not? The man confessed to what he’d done in the court’s first session, and repeated his confession more than fifty times in the sessions that followed. Given the details of the case, the judge’s boorishness and clumsy insistence on the point were completely out of place. The man had opened the door of his apartment himself and had surrendered to the police. He’d put up not the slightest resistance. He had confessed to the prosecut
or and confessed to the judge. I could not understand why, every session, the judge repeated the same question: “Did you kill them?” When the judge asked him to put his confession in writing, the man produced one in his own hand, a large, clear hand with no mistakes or crossings out. Maybe he took pride in this document. There was one small detail that no one dwelled on for very long: his statement that the only reason he had murdered his family was that he’d lost a lot of money on the stock exchange.

  But he showed no distress in the way he conducted himself—no feelings at all, in fact. Throughout the course of the trial, he was like the living dead, heedless of what went on around him. The prosecutor’s sallies seemed ridiculous given the confession made in the presence of so many witnesses and repeated so many times, and the defense’s arguments even more so. Everything about that trial seemed absurd. Even the judge, who insisted on hearing the confession more than fifty times, who demanded a written statement, who brought the accused out of his cage during the final session, handed him his written statement, and asked if it was his (to which he replied, “Yes”), then asked if it was in his handwriting (to which he replied, “Yes”), then asked for the last time if he had killed his family (to which he replied, “Yes”)—even the judge was a joke.

  Only the man himself didn’t seem ridiculous, and yet quite how to describe him I could never figure out.

  People were confounded. They all felt for the killer. This was a man of the bourgeoisie: comfortably off, a respectable job, didn’t take drugs (just smoked), owned a large apartment in a classy neighborhood and two cars, his children at foreign schools and the eldest daughter graduated with honors from a private university. He was the beau ideal of the contented middle class, a man with a secure future, envied by many for his stable life and beautiful family. And yet not one of the stunned onlookers thought to ask why it had happened. Psychologists and sociologists offered no analysis. Of course, the pretext of losses on the stock exchange was very thin, too weak for the prosecutor to have advanced it as a motive in court, and were it not for the man appending it to his detailed account of what he’d done, it would definitely have been consigned to the trash. Television talking heads seized on his story, but no one asked what his real motive was, and discussions of the case were followed by pop songs, reports on fashion shows, and political debate. And though I might not have been that concerned by the true cause, even I knew “financial losses” was a fabrication.