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By Root 350 0

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