“Lots of people,” she snapped. Then, after a pause: “It was Bahr who chose you, not the magazine.”
There was an astonished silence.
“Don’t ask me why. Maybe you could ask him yourself.”
I stared at her, the color drained from my face. I’d only met the man once and my name wasn’t well known enough to have caught the attention of an Egyptian overseas. The only way it would have gotten there is if I’d sailed ahead of it. Then, perhaps because Bahr did seem to know me and had requested me by name, a faint enthusiasm began to glow and catch inside me. Fearing any response that might douse this thin flame—yet more disappointment for Leila and myself—I shrank from seeking an explanation.
A job that might get me out of my rut, I told myself, and then, however many days or weeks later, I could return to my bed and Bahr could go back into exile. Who knows, maybe it would make it possible for me to go overseas. It might clear a path to lead me back to Leila. Or her to me.
Even before I knew the details, I had started to picture the assignment—this chain of investigations that has brought me this present moment. And everything I imagined, like everything else in life, turned out to be pure fantasy.
Slowly but surely I would come to understand that the whole edifice of articles and reports were cover for something else entirely, something considerably crazier—if we might be permitted to divide the world along those lines: the crazy and the not—but back then I didn’t know that. Nor did I know (and neither, somehow, did Bahr) that we would not be coming back. Just as had happened to Alya, before us.
Ahead of me, Bahr descended the shallow slope away from the way we’d come, mopping at his brow and calling out that our next stop was the village. The village of the departed. A place whose inhabitants had all died, I assumed, or been dispersed among the country’s towns and cities. The truth, like everything on this expedition, turned out to be stranger still. But before he could tell me more, I felt courage enter me and, suddenly buoyed, I called Bahr’s name. When he turned, I asked the question my pride had long deferred: “Why me?”
7
