At work, sitting with his colleagues at lunch, he plucked up his courage and decided that now was the time: he would sing or—to be more exact—would murmur a song. The first two words came out naturally enough—fakkarouni izzay—and when everyone turned around in astonishment, he sang louder: huwaaana nseeee eetet seet see… The stutter was back, a sucker punch, and a shout of laughter went up, followed by an embarrassed hush. Someone patted him on the shoulder and they changed the subject. At the end of the break they all went back to their desks.

He spent the night awake: running a temperature, writhing in the sheets.

He felt he would never recover that courage. He became a man who stayed out late and drank. Then, one evening, alone at the bar, under the cover of low lighting and the crowd of drinkers, he murmured a tune and he heard a woman say, “You have a beautiful voice.”

He turned. She was as bewitching as she’d sounded, and from the very first he knew she would not be his.

“Go on,” she said; his courage climbed out of its grave, and there, to his bewilderment, was his voice, as exquisite and smooth and unbroken as when he’d stood alone before the mirror.

8

THEY DIDN’T LOOK BACK

At first we saw a figure, someone hiding behind a wall and peering around the corner, but when we drew near we realized that the someone was a rag. A scrap from a robe, perhaps, caught on the wall and flapping back and forth in the breeze like a little flag.

At the entrance to the village were the remains of a coffee shop—closer to a roadside stall: two wooden benches beneath a tree and a palm-fiber rope slung on the ground around them to create the illusion of inside and outside. Our feet disappeared into a mist of garbage through which small, unidentifiable creatures moved about. I tensed, but took solace from my sturdy boots and Bahr’s unruffled calm.

He’d responded to my question by promising that he would explain why he’d chosen me, and everything else as well, once we came to the final stop on our journey. Recalling the foreboding I’d felt the day Leila entrusted me with this job, I didn’t press him further.

Once past the wall with its rag and the deserted stall, the houses came into view.

We were a long way from the highway and not a living sound came from the village—the silence was absolute. Unsettling to a city boy. We were in the Delta, but the houses were built tall, in the southern style, and perhaps it was only because I knew we were close to the sea, but I caught the tang of iodine and salt in the air. The houses where we strolled smelled of nothing at all.