But she just smiled. There were tears in her eyes, she was saying something I couldn’t hear, and I pulled her to me with my right arm, while with my left I cleared a path through the throng. Though we were all one body, so we didn’t feel the jostle and stumble of flesh, the rub of clothes. I was pulling Alya gently by the hand so she wouldn’t slip away, but then something was wrong, something unfamiliar in her touch against my palm, and looking behind me I saw that I was holding the hand of another woman, who was staring back at me with an expression somewhere between astonishment and disgust. I stammered an apology and looked past her, where I could see Alya as she fell further and further behind, her lips wide as though she were screaming. I tried pushing back to her against the flow of bodies, the joyous roaring river, but couldn’t.

PART TWO

ALMOST FOREVER

1

HIS COMMANDS

Ahmed woke with a start. His father was gone from the bedroom door. He went into the living room, still trembling at hearing the warm timbre of his father’s voice. It rang in his ears as he came to the door of his mother’s room, then pushed and entered.

A rattling groan swelled over the dawn prayers from the Sidi El Ghobashy mosque. He lurched forward in alarm. “Mother!” Shaking her, weeping. “Mother!”

She wasn’t quite gone, though, and he managed to bring her back from the brink—looking twenty years older, but alive. Moving and speaking, still transmitting instructions from a father, who—after that one visit—had seemingly broken off all contact with his son.

The story of his father’s intervention and the last-minute rescue spread among relatives, then neighbors. They began to question the mother—shyly at first and then insistently—about her visions of the departed and what he said.

And his mother picked up where she had left off: a conduit for each installment of advice, for whose sagacity and sound sense the only equal was the next. Ahmed, meanwhile, returned to his suspicions. And yet… And yet, he’d never known his mother to speak this way before. This was his father’s wisdom. His father’s strength and cruelty, too.

And the more people speculated and asked questions, the more they sought to benefit from her visions, her prudent revelations, the more his mother withdrew.

“Your father isn’t dead,” she would say, strength coursing through the words that pushed their way out through the lines and wrinkles around her mouth, old age fogging the femininity of her voice until it sometimes seemed to actually be his father’s. He would watch her as she sat alone, muttering and waving her hands as if talking to someone, but he never had the courage to approach her.