She was standing there, illuminated by the light from the window: of average height, broad, wide-eyed, red-haired. She was wearing a white robe, a man’s robe that looked big on her, one hand holding the hem while the other gently swirled a kanaka over a low flame. She smiled, as though expecting me.

“I’m Alya. Coffee?”

One slow nod and I had forgotten the world outside.

When, later, I’d try to remember the song Alya had been singing in the kitchen that morning I would fail, and when she told me she couldn’t remember either, I’d tell myself that surely she must know, that she couldn’t be trying hard enough. But I do recall the strange murmur she made as she was humming or breathing the tune; a sound as familiar as the faint rippling of the river beneath my feet. And I recall what she told me when I asked her what it was.

“Haad,” she told me.

“Haad?”

“The sound of the sea.”

Her mouth to my ear: “Close your eyes, Seif.”

Her lips brushed my lobe and she hummed, and then there was the sound of waves surging. I could smell the sharp salt tang of my adolescence in Bahri. The days we used to take off up to Alexandria on the six a.m. train, trying to chat up pink peasant schoolgirls riding between their Delta towns—the girls crammed and jostling the length of the packed wooden benches, wedged against the broken windows—and at the end of the line, with the last of them gone, getting off at Sidi Gaber and taking the streetcar to Al Ramal.

“But it’s not the same as lajab,” she said.

“What’s that again?”

“The sound of waves breaking against each other.”

And then, to my astonishment, I heard the sound of the high crashing waves in whose clothes-soaking spray we used to delight. And I lifted my head, opened my eyes, and looked at her.

“What else?”

“Everything.” She smiled. “All the sounds.”

Himar: the sound of falling rain. Ajij: the sound of flame. Flutterings, tricklings, grazings, trillings. Sounds I didn’t know had names, names I didn’t know had sounds, and Alya knew every one, could sing them all. In the morning, humming; in the evening, singing; at midday taking me on a journey through the sounds of every wave there was.

But the word for the sound of the river over which we walked? That, I could not remember. I watched Bahr climbing a flight of steps on the far bank. He turned back to me and asked, “Are you ready to see more?”

5

A DOCTOR

The first thing Ashraf noted was the absence of mirrors. There were broad windows, their tinted glass blotting up the pale light, but no mirrors. There wasn’t a single familiar face in this strange place, and he couldn’t even see his own.