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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

It was now common knowledge that, despite his death, his father was still alive. Relatives and neighbors in search of guidance gathered daily outside the family home. One day, Ahmed dozed off on the sofa for a few minutes, and he saw his father again. This time, he didn’t speak. He was carrying an old brown suitcase with a broken handle, and he opened the front door of the apartment as if to leave. Then he paused in the doorway and called out, “Bye then, Sayyida.”

Ahmed glanced at the door to his mother’s bedroom and sensed movement, footsteps approaching. He woke and heaved himself to his feet. There was no sound as he entered the room. He stood by the door looking down at her body, so still and silent it might have been lying there for a thousand years. Though he was quite sure, he reached out a hand and shook her anyway. The body rocked in answer, then stilled, and he smelled death. He wondered what he would say to the crowd outside who had all come for guidance.

2

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THEY DIDN’T SEEM SAD; JUST NOT ENTIRELY PRESENT, PERHAPS

It began a couple of weeks after I lost Alya.

The first dead person I saw was Hassan Yaqout, sitting alone at the Tawfiq Café as was his habit, and smoking a narghile. We used to call the place The One Man Café because it was so small; we couldn’t understand how it managed to stay open with just two tables for its customers.

The past few years had been so eventful that I’d quite forgotten Hassan Yaqout was dead. It had been a car accident, three or four years ago. A Peugeot taxi with its complement of seven passengers had overturned on the way back from his home district in Beni Sueif, where they made the little rugs and earrings that he hawked to tourists and students in the city.

I wasn’t thinking of the accident when I saw Hassan. I wasn’t thinking about him at all. My gaze passed over him quite by chance and took him in, sitting there as I’d seen him hundreds of times before. I kept driving, but after I’d negotiated the car through the traffic of Maarouf Street, just as I turned right onto Talaat Harb, it struck me that he was dead. I stopped my little ’92 Suzuki dead in the middle of the road, deaf to the horns and obscenities that sounded in protest.