Can we still hear the sounds of battle ten years later?

Here is the whisper of live steps, walking under the skin in a false submissiveness, coexisting with the present, sometimes proudly flattering the missed moment, and cursing it with anger at other times. We look at moments experienced by dozens of minors, children who participated in the first battle of Muhammad Mahmoud, which took place in November of the year of the Egyptian revolution. We look at the official moment as recorded in the papers, hear a few of their voices and try to draw their features from the misshapen description; they move on paper despite the steadfastness of absurd accusations and its ability to kill the mind of a child facing a fierce authority, alone, without parents or a lawyer in most investigations. Thirty-eight children, a number of them injured, stand in front of the investigation authorities, which were set up in the background of a major event taking place in the streets, two streets away from Abdeen Court, which witnessed the events of most of the investigations. The killing machine was relentlessly reaping lives; eyes bled and their light gone forever. Two streets away from Abdeen court, incidents- that official papers could not deny no matter how hard they tried to- took place.

From the first moment I re-read the papers in this case, I realized that going back is like going against the flow, expensive, peeling back layers of memory illusion. How can a story be read ten years later without thinking about the life path of its protagonists? They were young and became young men and women going through life now, with different destinies. Did they reconcile with that moment or did they leave it at the bottom of their memory to be buried in their remote poor neighborhoods from which most of them came? Most of them were far from the center, far from that “Egypt” that attracted the lenses of the world’s photographers at that moment. Most of them longed to “watch the event” as they innocently expressed in some investigations, but when they came, there was no room for free watching and childish joking; they had come to the land of exorbitant prices where the government collapses in front of the military council’s control over the course of governance, to begin the era of painful blows to the revolutionary path: the Muslim Brotherhood is in a state of political euphoria, preparing for the empowerment elections, and the revolutionary opposition is divided between participating in the first parliamentary elections and supporting the revolutionaries’ battle on the ground. When the children of that battle came, everything had a price, and every step in the streets of this city had a meaning and a path paved with danger.