Chicago, Alaa Aswany [first e reader .TXT] 📗

mother not fight during the night so she wouldn’t be awakened in fright, as often happened. She recalled her first night with Jeff, the first tremor of pleasure and her alarm at the drops of blood that had stained the bed and Jeff’s voice whispering, “Now you’re a real woman.”

The first time she saw Jeff snorting, she chided him harshly, reciting all she had learned at school about the danger of drugs. But he laughed and said simply, “If you haven’t tried it you don’t have the right to talk about it. It’s a fantastic medium. Without it I wouldn’t have seen the world as I depict it in my paintings.”

He kept insisting that she snort with him, but she adamantly refused. One night she was in bed with him and he persisted again more strongly. He said, as if pleading with her, “Listen to me. I want what’s good for you. Dope doesn’t take away your consciousness; it gives you additional consciousness. Try it just once, and if you don’t like it, don’t ever touch it again.”

She will never forget the first ecstasy. As soon as she snorted the powder she felt as if she were flying, soaring among the clouds: no sorrows, no worries, no fear about the future; a pure burning and raging happiness. Then she had sex with him and climaxed. Next time he offered her the dope she didn’t mind. When she asked him for it the third time he laughed out loud for a long time and said as he handed her the rolled-up paper, “Welcome to Club Happiness!”

Making love came to be associated with snorting, which took her to the highest levels of orgasm. It made her shake strongly several times, scream loudly, and then her body would subside, dying and being reborn from sheer love. Now Jeff was trying to resume what had been interrupted. He got closer until he clung to her then whispered, “Goddamn your foolish father; he ruined our trip.”

He was talking in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, as if commenting on bad weather conditions or a traffic jam. His voice was neutral and his regret light and passing. He didn’t wait for her reply, as if he took it for granted. He reached out for the bottle that originally had vitamins in it, raised it against the light, looked at it and shook it carefully, then emptied a little of the powder onto the dish, using a small razor to separate a thin line. When he started snorting through the tube, Sarah got up suddenly. She moved away and went toward the window quickly, as if she were running away. She was making a feeble, low-key attempt that she knew deep down was doomed to fail before it even began. She turned her face away and began to look out of the window. Jeff, as usual, seemed confident of her response. He looked at her with a smile, as if making fun of her childlike attempt to play hard to get. He extended his hand with the funnel. His blue eyes were exuding total control and when he sensed her reluctance, he said in a confident voice, as if concluding a pending matter, “Come on, little girl. Enough playing outside. Come back to the garden!”

She lowered her gaze and moved toward him, her head bowed, her will bent, burdened with all the hopelessness that in a few moments would turn into overpowering, boisterous pleasure. She threw herself next to him on the sofa, picked up the tube, raised it slowly to her nostril, closed her eyes, and snorted hard.

CHAPTER 25

Ever since General Safwat Shakir was a student at the police academy, his instructors predicted that he would have a brilliant future because of the strength of his personality, his precision, and his mental and physical capabilities. After graduation he worked as an assistant in the Azbakiya secret detective division and was able, despite his young age, to greatly optimize the way the system there worked. Back then, the work of a detective simply consisted of arresting suspects and torturing them until they confessed. Methods of torture were conventional: suspects were beaten, bastinadoed, or flogged with oversize whips. If a suspect insisted on denying the charges, he would be violated by the insertion of a thick stick up his anus, the putting out of cigarettes on his penis, or the administering of electric shocks to his naked body. Torture continued until the suspect gave in and confessed to what he was accused of. Those conventional methods were useful, of course, but they resulted in the death of many suspects, which led to some embarrassing situations. A detective would then have one of two options: either to obtain a medical report indicating that the suspect had died as a result of a sudden drop in blood circulation, then order him to be buried secretly after threatening his family with detention and torture if they opened their mouths, or to order the plainclothesmen to throw the suspect’s body from the police station balcony, then write a report afterward indicating that he had committed suicide.

The young officer Safwat Shakir, after obtaining his supervisor’s permission, introduced a new protocol: instead of beatings and electric shocks, he would arrest the suspect’s wife (his mother or sister if he was a bachelor); then he would order his men to take off the woman’s clothes, one item at a time until she was naked, then they would begin to fondle her body in front of her husband, who would soon collapse and confess to whatever he was asked to confess. The new protocol led to brilliant results, and bringing cases to closure took half the customary time, so much so that the head of the Azbakiya precinct, for several years in a row, received letters of thanks from the minister of the interior, commending the precinct for its productivity and precision. Only one time was there