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Chapters (32)
  1. Cover
  2. PART ONE
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
  9. 7
  10. 8
  11. 9
  12. 10
  13. 11
  14. 12
  15. 13
  16. 14
  17. PART TWO
  18. 1
  19. 2
  20. 3
  21. 4
  22. 5
  23. 6
  24. 7
  25. 8
  26. 9
  27. 10
  28. AFTERWORD
  29. 1
  30. 2
  31. 3
  32. 4

By the date they were due to depart, six births and three deaths had brought their number to four hundred and nineteen. With all their possessions sold, they had spent the last few nights sleeping on the ground. They had agreed to meet in Balteem and so set out: some on foot, others in vehicles. The last to leave the village destroyed the little signpost, which the village letterer had painted just two months before his death. They threw the sign down and heaped it with dust. Like burying the place’s history; wiping its memory clean away. Little village of poverty, of hunger, of forgetting: farewell.

The boat came through the fog at dawn. They moved through the scattered tin shacks tucked between the dunes of Balteem and emerged, clans and families, brothers and sisters and aunts and cousins, to clamber slowly into the sea-dark boat, whose prow dipped at each boarding to sip the waves, then rose. On deck, they assembled family alongside family, clan next to clan, their distribution on board a map of the homes they’d left behind; the North, South, East, and West of their modest rural district. They brought nothing with them, just a little food and water, though a few girls held tiny dolls constructed from rabab frames, doum husks, and locks of hair.

The village had clambered in and—every soul accounted for, rope cast off, anchor raised, oars rolling—slipped away into the dark. Not one of them would ever again so much as think of Wahda, where Bahr and I now stood.

9

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NOBODY NOTICED THINGS HAD CHANGED

It irritated me, the constant fidgeting of the thin young man who sat between us, his knee knocking a tattoo against the table leg. Just a short while later, I was to stop holding anything against him, but at that particular moment, there in the café, I could not meet his eye without betraying my agitation. He was telling us the story of what had happened to their building.

It was when the building’s elevator suddenly stopped working that the residents first really understood the danger posed by the construction of the new hotel next door. Vast excavators and dozers disrupted the pipes and wiring that fed into their venerable building. The electricity started cutting out: the wooden elevator gave up the ghost, appliances fell silent, exploding lightbulbs were a daily ritual. But this wasn’t the worst of it.