“Wear the blue, my boy,” she repeated, “God will bless your day.”

And so it was—starting the day of the ducks, some four months since his passing—that Ahmed’s father reestablished himself in the house: dictating what they ate, prodding them to visit this relative or that, sharing the location of old documents that lay hidden in drifts of loose paper and junk. And as time went on, these edicts started to touch on more serious matters. For instance, the demand—couched in the same coded language of dreams—that his son give up his night job. Ahmed was distraught at first, then settled into bitter resentment. His stomach problem, a constant companion while his father was still alive, came back. He kept expecting to see him sitting in the living room, or run into him on the way to the bathroom, and whenever he hung back from fulfilling these dream-conveyed commands, his mother would wail, “God protect you, my boy!” in a tone of genuine apprehension. And in those words, an insinuation: divine protection was entirely dependent on the father not being provoked, even in death.

The suspicion that she might be fabricating these dreams crept into his thoughts, then crystallized. Specifically, the time she interpreted a dream to mean he should stay away from a girl he was thinking of marrying, followed by another girl, soon after. Father wouldn’t care who I married, he told himself, his doubts growing. And though he lacked the courage to confront her, he had begun to think of her revelations as lies. At times, the waves of suspicion would swell and he’d be angry at her; at others, they’d settle, and the anger would turn on his father, lording over their household from the grave.

Just as he was considering leaving home altogether, his father came to him in a dream. It was the first time he had come to Ahmed: He stood mournfully at Ahmed’s bedroom door and nodded toward the room where he himself had once slept.

“Get up,” he said. “Wake your mother.”

2

THE PASSERS-BY DON’T CARE WHAT WE DO

Clouds inched across the sky as though afraid they’d spill, while down below I strained to keep up with Bahr’s short-legged but rapid clip.

In Muharram Bey, he led me down a narrow street with wide balconies beneath its windows before coming to a halt outside a huge, silent building which ran the length of a block, and there we lingered for a moment. Bahr appeared to be thinking. Then off he set again, trotting along until we came to a broad avenue aglow in the pale sunlight of early winter.