“Yes, I am saying no.” Raymond made no effort to hide his impatience. “I do not ask you to do my job for me, Warden. So please don’t ask me to do your job for you.”

  “What’s wrong with you, you Jewish dog?” The deputy warden yelled and then aimed his baton at me. “This man Ali Hassan is a filthy son of a whore. He despises you. If he was given half a chance, he would take this rod and beat you to a bloody pulp right now.”

  “If you’re that desperate for confessions, why don’t you just start making them up?” Raymond asked, pronouncing the words exactingly. “Or are you worried that will hurt your country’s shiny new image as a beacon of liberty?”

  “So is this your final determination?” the visitor asked, speaking English with an accent that was strikingly similar to Raymond’s. “Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”

  “Richtig.” Raymond snorted.

  “Listen to me, inmate.” The warden took the baton from his deputy and put a hand on Raymond’s shoulder as if he was trying to counsel him. “I want you to understand something. If you do not do what we’re asking, we will beat you instead. And we will beat you very, very badly, so you may not ever recover. We have done this before, and we’re very good at it. Okay?”

  “I do understand.” Raymond blinked very slowly. “But I will not do what I cannot do. So here we are.”

  The visitor sighed and scratched one of his lacquered temples with a broad polished fingernail.

  The warden smashed Raymond across the bridge of the nose with his baton, sending a small geyser of blood into the air.

  “Scheisse.” Raymond gritted his teeth and shut his eyes again.

  “Okay?” The warden held the baton out to him like a maître d’ offering a menu. “Now, if you would be so kind…”

  Raymond touched the bleeding gash, tipped his head, and looked down his nose at the visitor.

  “Nein.” He refused with an aristocratic shake of his head. “Ich lehne ab.”

  The warden doubled Raymond up with a blow to the midsection. Then he got behind Raymond and used the baton to choke him until both their faces started to turn bright purple.

  “Inta majnoon!” the warden shouted. “Look what you’re making us do!”

  He abruptly let go and Raymond stumbled forward, gulping and clutching his throat. The visitor watched with a hand languidly resting on his chin.

  “Okay,” the warden said. “Will you be sensible now?”

  “Fick dich.” Raymond glared at the guest again.

  The stranger gave another nod, like a referee allowing a fight to continue; and the officers all fell on Raymond at once, kicking and stomping with unrestrained fury and frustration. After a few seconds, the warden took the baton and got down on one knee, smashing the rod down on the back of Raymond’s neck as if he were trying to kill a snake in his garden.

  Raymond stayed down, giving only the occasional grunt and groan to acknowledge the force of their blows. The warden took off his jacket, revealing half-moons of sweat under his arms, and then wrung out his cramping-up baton hand before bending down again to administer another frantic flurry of close-range punches to Raymond’s head. The deputy warden kept jumping on Raymond’s back and falling off. The sergeant grew flustered and then fatigued as he rubbed his bluebird tattoo with the heel of his palm. They were like a demolition crew working overtime to try to finish a project.

  “Khalas,” said the visitor. Enough.

  They backed away slowly, revealing Raymond facedown and motionless. The floor around him appeared to be throbbing from punishment.

  The warden sagged against a wall calendar, exhausted, breathing heavily and loosening his collar as if he was about to pass out.

  The visitor came over, knelt beside Raymond, and felt for a pulse in his neck. Then he pushed back his sunglasses, nodded to indicate the patient was still alive, and brushed the wrinkles from his tailored suit as he stood up.

  I turned my head, not wanting to look anymore.

  This foreigner, this outsider, this kufar, this filthy Jew who might have been a spy for our enemy and whom I had almost dropped off a cliff. There was no reason for me to feel sympathy for him. Spy or not, he was an interloper who never should have been in the country in the first place.

  So why did my ribs, neck, and shoulders all throb like I’d absorbed half the punishment myself? The warden dropped the baton, which rolled across the floor, winding up at my feet. Then he bumped into his own chessboard, upending it with a tumultuous clatter.

  “Let that be a lesson,” he said, kicking at the fallen pieces in disgust before he turned to walk out. “Sergeant, clean up this mess and put things back into order.”

  June 1, 2015

  To: GrandpaAli71@aol.com

  From: Nosleeptiljihad@protonmail.com

  Grandfather,

  I am taking a very big risk in writing to you right now, since my commanders have specifically forbidden it.

  I just need to tell you how I feel about what I’ve been reading.

  When we’re not praying, training, or working on the videos, we study history in our camp. We talk often about Israel. We learn how they stole the land from us in the 1948 war that your cousin Sherif fought in so bravely. We learn how this theft was justified by religious mythology about Hebrew slaves and a Promised Land, bolstered by this Ten Commandments movie you’d worked on only a few years after the war. It’s so odd, so insulting. We learn how these lies that you helped to propagate to justify this theft continue to poison us to this very day, as the illegal occupation goes on and our brothers and sisters in Palestine keep dying.

  Now you’re trying to twist my head back the other way with this toxic accommodationist propaganda about a Jew playing the hero and taking a beating in your place. And not just any Jew, but one you yourself suspected of being a spy for the country that stole this land?

  It’s too much. I’m disgusted from reading this. What am I supposed to do with this book now? Did you make it up to try to dissuade me from the path I am on? Or did you store up these lies for years so you could spring them on me when I was about to become a legal adult?

  Abu Suror

  P.S. Shayma is gone now, because she got shot while trying to escape from her new husband.

  Meanwhile. We have a Jewish guest in our midst ourselves, named Tyler Sommers. At least, I think he’s a Jew. And he’s not exactly our guest. Anyway, gotta bounce. Bye.

  26

  When next I saw Raymond, several days later, I did not recognize him. In fact, I could not even tell he was a white man at first. He’d been beaten so badly that his eyes were swollen half shut. His skin was puffy and discolored, with patches of mustard and black. His broken nose was covered in scabs. His old clothes had been taken away and he had been given a galabiya and oversized sandals instead. He was leaning heavily on a crude wooden stick and every few minutes, when he thought no one was looking, he gently pressed his hand against his abdomen, as if his injuries were internal as well.

  I ignored him at first, instead preferring to watch the soccer game that was being played between a group of Muslim Brothers and the Jewish spies.

  Word had gotten out somehow about Raymond’s refusal to beat me, and it had become part of a general lowering of barriers between our groups. Probably this would have happened anyway. Outside the prison gates, these people were, as you say, our mortal enemies. Sherif liked to point out passages from the Koran that described them as pigs and foul, slinking apes. They were everything that the Brotherhood had been formed to oppose: Zionist aggressors, betrayers of our country, liars and perverters of the injunctions God had handed down from the mountaintop. Terrorists, the professor said, at least as much as the rest of us. But within these walls, all that was irrelevant. They were our fellow inmates. They slept in cells in our block and ate the same food as we did. And now it was undeniable that they were tormented and tortured just as we were by the guards.

  Gray dirt plumes rose from the men wrestling and scuffling over the bundle of laundry they were using as a ball, the guards occasionally stepping in when the play got too rough and the men fell on top of one another, biting and punching, doing all the things they’d do to our keepers if they ever had the chance. Across the yard, Raymond was trying to light a cigarette as he leaned against a wall, his hands shaking badly. I don’t know where he could have gotten the tobacco and matches. Such riches were rare within these walls. It annoyed me enough that he was holding them in public, but that he was unable to use them properly drove me to pure distraction.

  I waited until the game became so fierce that no one was taking notice, and then I sidled up next to him by the stone wall.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I hissed. “Put those away.”

  “Why?” He tried to shift his weight onto his crooked right leg. “You think someone might get mad?”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets, refusing to acknowledge the joke.

  “I suppose you think I should thank you,” I said after a while.

  “I’m not sure I care,” he said, trying to light the match again.

  “Yanni, you know, one more beating would have made no difference to me,” I muttered. “I’m used to it.”

  “You couldn’t have told me that before?”

  “Again a joke. You’re as bad as my father.”

  “What’s wrong with your father? Other than having you as a son.”

  I scratched the back of my neck and looked away from him, so it would appear to anyone watching that we just happened to be standing near each other.

  “Why did you do this, anyway?” I put my hand in front of my mouth, to frustrate any lip-readers in the yard or the guard towers.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I just have a problem with authority figures. Especially when they have that accent.”

  “It sounded just like your accent. Do you know that man?”

  “No. But I know what he is.”

  “Which is what?” I asked, truly curious.

  “Please, Ali, you’ve heard the exact same rumors that I have about German officers staying on in Egypt after the war and blending in to avoid prosecution.” He touched his side again and winced, as if angry at himself for the pain. “It’s said that special identities have been created by your intelligence service for the ones with real expertise in science and interrogation techniques that can be useful to this country’s security service. I don’t necessarily blame Egypt, since other countries have done the same. Including the United States. But I believe the warden’s new friend is one of these ‘special guests.’”

  I glanced at the game, trying to decide if I had a rooting interest. “Then why antagonize him the way you did?”

  “I will tell you why not.” His sleepy eyes became sharp as razors. “I was born in Berlin in 1921. My father was a proper petit bourgeois, who ran a medical supply shop that sold prosthetic limbs to soldiers who’d been maimed in the first great war.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You asked why people like our guest the other day irk me and now I’m telling you,” he said. “My father served with such men in the first great war and was awarded the Iron Cross himself, but he never wore it. He never spoke about his service at all. He preferred to take me to the Delphi Filmpalast every Saturday after shul and laugh himself silly at Buster Keaton. Then when I was twelve, he took half our family savings and sent me to live in America with his brother, who had a film lab. And do you know how his fellow citizens showed their appreciation for his patriotic service? They sent my mother and my sister to Auschwitz. And then they sent him to Buchenwald.”

  “I don’t know what those places are,” I confessed.

  I don’t know what they teach you in school these days, Alex, but German concentration camps were not much discussed back then. Especially not in Egypt. To the extent that any of my fellow countrymen talked about the war, it was to side with the Germans, because they hated the British as much as we did.

  “They are places that ordinary citizens were sent to and did not come back from.” He tried again to light the cigarette, but his hand was shaking too badly. “So when I hear that accent, the spirit of cooperation dies in me.”

  I grabbed the matchbook and lit the cigarette for him. Fortunately, the players were in a pileup in the middle of the yard and no one noticed. Not even when he took a long drag and started to wheeze.

  “Raymond, your lungs sound terrible. Have they taken you to the prison infirmary?”

  “Twice. The doctor there is such a quack, I shouldn’t be surprised if he had webbed feet.”

  “A ‘quack’?” My English was quite good by then, but this was a new idiom to me.

  “You tell him you’re pissing blood, and he gives you a purgative.” Raymond’s laugh turned into a cough.

  “Is that what’s happening to you? You’re pissing blood as well?”

  “I was just being figurative, Ali.”

  I took a quick sideways look and saw his hand linger briefly over his abdomen again. “Are you sure?” I asked. “As soon as your government gets you out of here, they should have you taken straight to the best hospital available.”

  “Who said anyone was getting me out of here?” He looked genuinely perplexed. “The last time I saw a lawyer from the U.S. Embassy, he said I might be going before a military tribunal. Like the rest of you.”

  The game had stopped for a minute. The laundry bundle had come apart and had to be gathered up again. The players were standing in a cloud of raging dust, arguing about who should do it.

  “How is this possible?” I said. “I thought you were an American citizen.”

  He took a long, thoughtful drag on the butt. “I’m a resident alien. I never got my full citizenship.”

  “Even though you were in the United States military?”

  “My application got held up.” He exhaled a prodigious amount of smoke. “Some questions were raised.”

  “What kind of questions?” I waved the cloud from my face. “Did someone think you were a spy?”

  “A spy?” He squinted incredulously. “For who? The Russians? Do I look like a Communist to you?”

  In the prison pecking order, Communists were below even the Jews and the Ikhwan. A group of them were gathered in a corner of the yard, shunned by the rest of the population and not allowed to take part in the soccer game. Not only had they been savagely beaten like the rest of us, they had also had their eyebrows shaved off afterward to degrade and dehumanize them. The cruel irony was that in just a few short years Nasser would become an ally of the Soviet Union, but by then it would be too late for such men.

  “No, the great Cecil B. DeMille would never have hired me if I was a true party member with my name currently on the blacklist. The suspicions held up my application, but I was ultimately cleared. I only went to a few meetings anyway. I like a good bottle of wine, clean hotel rooms, and women who shave their legs too much to be a good socialist.”

  “You know, Raymond, there’s a rumor in here that you’re about to be charged as a spy for Israel,” I said in a low voice.

  The cigarette stayed tucked in the corner of his mouth, a slow-burning fuse, without breath going in or out.

  “Rumors are just rumors,” he said.

  “Do they have any proof against you?”

  “Other than that time pencil you gave me?” A brief wisp of a smile disappeared in his fumes.

  “They must have more than that if they’re going to go ahead and charge you.”

  “Oh, do you really think so?” he said lightly, as if he was parodying the way Henry talked.

  I noticed Sherif, the professor, and some of the other Brothers shooting furtive looks at us from across the yard and then turning their backs.

  “Raymond, it’s no joke.” I took a step away from him. “If they convict you of being a spy, they will hang you for sure.”

  “This I already surmised.”

  “Then why didn’t you beat me when they asked you to?”

  “That’s a good question.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it. “Maybe I just thought I could use a friend in here.”

  “So you allowed yourself to take my punishment for me?”

  “I thought you might appreciate it.”

  I tried to lean back against the wall. But it was farther away than I realized and I stumbled against it awkwardly.

  “What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “Doesn’t it? I thought you might return the favor at some point.”

  “So it’s just a matter of horse-trading?” I tried to straighten up.

  “Or mutual interest.”

  From across the yard, my cousin was looking at us and showing Professor Farid a crisscross gesture with his hands, as if demonstrating a connection.

  “You know, it would make sense if you were a spy,” I said. “All the chances you took with the camera when you were hanging off the edge of the cliff. Those were ammunition dumps in the caves below, weren’t they?”

  “If you say so.” Raymond dropped his cigarette on the ground.

  “Those would be good strategic positions for an invading army to know about.”

  I saw Sherif say something behind his hand to the professor.

  “Have you confided any of your suspicions about me to the Muslim Brothers or the authorities?” Raymond asked.

  “Not yet. But maybe I should. They say Nasser’s judges will give lighter sentences to those who cooperate.”

  “Then why don’t you?” Raymond crushed the smoldering embers with his sandal. “The sooner you get out, the sooner you can be with our female friend. I can assure you, she has no use for me.”

  “Believe me”—I faced away from him—“I’m considering it.”

  A bell started to ring, indicating yard time was over. The game ended and the players pulled the bundle apart, taking back their clothes. The Jews went back to their corner. The Communists huddled together. And the Brothers formed a line to head back to their cells. Except for Sherif, who kept staring at Raymond and me while pulling harder and harder on his beard.