Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [95]
A bedraggled brown sheep plodded through a winter drizzle in the main square. The shops were closed, the shutters yanked to the ground. The streets were empty, the balconies deserted. We drove to the Brotherhood’s walkup offices, and found a padlock on the door.
A little boy wheeled by on a bicycle. “They arrested two of the big guys,” he said. “That’s all we know.” He pedaled quickly off.
We asked blank-faced men, punched numbers into cell phones, and finally we found a Brotherhood lawyer who took us to Heshmat’s home. He looked frail, folded into a low armchair in his button-down cardigan. Reedy ankles poked from his pants. He told us what had happened the night before.
He had been ahead at 1:30 in the morning. The judges had started to wander over and shake his hand. Then a security director arrived and asked Heshmat to leave. He called some judges he knew in Alexandria. Was the supervising judge trustworthy? Word came back: Yes, he’s clean. Go ahead. Heshmat left the building in high spirits. Only a matter of time, he thought. But dawn broke. Security forces were being trucked in from neighboring provinces. The government, it seemed, was bracing for unrest. At seven, the judge and security director finally emerged. They didn’t make eye contact with Heshmat. Their announcement was plain: Fiqi by a landslide.
Now Heshmat’s bravado was gone. You could see defeat in every curve of his posture.
“I don’t know how he’ll feel, being Parliament speaker, knowing he won by forgery. As an intellectual, he’s finished,” he half whined. “I’m planning to appeal and planning to go global to expose what’s happened.” But his voice was listless.
He dropped his head.
“This is such a stupid regime. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
A neighbor burst into his apartment. He had come angry; he wanted Heshmat to put the men out to fight in the streets.
“I really disagree with you,” he told Heshmat, white beard dancing jerkily to his words. “The people are ready to die.”
“So many people were arrested …” Heshmat trailed off.
“So what? So what? Even if they arrest a thousand, so what? We were all willing to die for the ballot boxes yesterday. What they did was unbelievable.”
But Heshmat was unmoved. His son, an art student, had been carted off to jail overnight, along with dozens of other young men. He didn’t have any push left.
“I’m concerned about the people’s safety,” he said. “At the end of the day, this is a crazy regime. They walked all over the people’s will. They can do whatever they want.”
This is called compromise in Egypt: giving the regime what it wants, and what it always knew it would get, one way or the other. Egypt is a study in endurance.
Heshmat finally popped up in Cairo, but it was too late. He made some angry speeches. He said he’d been robbed. He wasn’t the only one: other Brotherhood candidates risked arrest to tell the world they’d been cheated in their precincts. Some judges came forward, too, and testified to the vote rigging.
But their moment had already passed. Ancient, implacable Egypt was creaking forward, crushing the things that had to be crushed.
Fiqi became head of the foreign affairs committee, just like everybody had predicted. He never made any excuses for what happened in Damanhour; he didn’t discuss it at all. He knew, I think, that it didn’t really matter.
Even with all the dirty tricks, the Brotherhood still did better than anybody expected them to do. They wound up with a fifth of the Parliament. It was their strongest showing in history. The Bush administration saw that, too. They saw the Brotherhood, and Hamas, and Hezbollah all cashing in on elections. After that, we stopped hearing so much about democracy for Arabs. As it turned out, it didn’t look the way they had expected.
I was asleep early one morning when I felt an earthquake roll through the house, as if Cairo were a spread of water and