BooksBarbecue
Back Slipping Save as PDF
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

Out I went, barely aware I was walking. I found myself standing at the window where I would later watch Leila. Unlike her, though, I wasn’t looking at my feet, but at a tree down below whose leaves were stirring in a breeze. I looked at its branches, black in the night, and wondered why anyone would ever want to throw a stone at a harmless little bird; and what its chances of survival would be.

A bird of a type I couldn’t identify flew over Bahr and me. The gravestones had finally petered out. We had yet to see another human.

11

Image

ACCORDING TO PREFERENCE

“Dignity is the heaviest thing in a man,” Bahr said as we waited for the doctor whose name, according to Bahr, was Ashraf. We weren’t sitting in a waiting room, but in the cafeteria of a gas station by a highway on the outskirts of Cairo. “He’s nervous,” Bahr had told me. “He insisted we meet here.”

“Dignity!” he said again. “It weighs about eighty kilos. A little less, perhaps.”

He sipped at his coffee.