Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [94]
The package was crammed with blank ballots, each one marked with the official eagle stamp of the Interior Ministry. “We’re being raped!” the people howled. “It’s fraud! It’s fraud!” Hundreds, thousands of blank ballots piled in the street like snowdrifts, shredded under a scuffle of sandals. Men pounced on the paper like children snatching at candy from a piñata, scooped the ballots up, yelling all the while. They were righteous; they had proof! But they looked around and realized there was nobody to show. A man stopped and stared in my eyes. “Please tell everything you see here today to the international organizations with great frankness,” he said. I nodded. I didn’t bother to answer. People in these places always cling to that hope—that somewhere in the world, something stronger than their government is watching. Against all evidence, they still believe in referees. They see me, a foreigner, and think I represent the referee. They don’t know that this story has been written before, over and over again, and still the status quo sits stolid.
A slight man in a sweater vest and necktie lingered at the edge of the crowd, watching with weary eyes. He did not scream or wave the ballots. He was a forty-seven-year-old engineer. “I am not a Muslim Brother,” he told me pointedly. But watching his hometown vote get rigged, he was melancholy.
“I did my best to be a good man in this society,” he said, carefully pronouncing the English words. “But I feel too much small. I cannot find myself in my own country.”
He waved an arm at the ballots. “I am feeling that I am nothing,” he said. “I want to feel that I am a man, that I am a member of this society.” He shook his head, and stopped talking.
Boots clattered on the sidewalk; police conscripts had come to control the mob. They ringed the school and probed the crowd with anxious eyes. Some of the Brothers slipped near and spoke to them quietly over their shields. “All of this is just for you,” one of the Brothers said. “We’re doing this just for you, so you shouldn’t beat us.”
The conscripts nodded and smiled blankly at the Brothers. They looked young, underfed, and nervous. “What a black night,” one of the conscripts muttered to his neighbor. And then he said it again: “What a black night.”
The rain came slowly at first, but then the skies opened. The streetlights with their cheap wiring sizzled and snapped overhead. The dust turned to mud in the road and then disappeared under gleaming puddles.
The men of the Brotherhood stood straight and said a prayer for the rain. They prayed that the rain would fall all around them but would leave them dry. They prayed that the water would go straight down to the roots of the plants. They prayed as if the rain were a promise from God, and after each line the men said, “Ya Allah.” O God.
Their voices rang like metal through the wet streets, carrying to the high walls ringing the school where the ballots were being counted, over the heads of the police generals who cowered beneath the dripping trees with their shoulders full of stars.
The night wore on and on. In the end, we drove back to Cairo. The men were still locked up in the ballot station. There would be no word until morning.
In the morning, it came. Moustafa Fiqi had won the seat in Damanhour.
Things like this happen, and you wait for the world to explode. You have heard all the words and threats, the vows of vengeance. I woke up the gray morning after the vote with a hangover from tear gas, adrenaline, and other people’s rage. A bruise had come out on my face. Terse and silent, Hossam and I jolted back over those long, rutted roads to Damanhour, expecting to find a riot in the street, the town closed by tanks, fires in the sky.
There was nothing. Violence